I dream of looks that burn
And eyelashes that ****
To make grown men cry
And young girls whimper
Dressed to repress
And drowned in romance
and envious glances
Yet I falter for young daffodils
And joy and laughter
And I dream of love
And happy ever after
But I put so much effort
And care and tenderness
Into the thought of others
There's nothing left for me
.

i don't know why you left

was it the miles between our calls
or the years between
because if so id understand
was it the secrets
or having to keep things from me
because if so id understand

but if it was not loving enough
if it was not caring
if it was boredom
or if you just stopped liking me
i don't understand

because I loved enough for the both of us
and you always said you cared
and we always had something to discuss
you said you liked me even if you only would on a dare
and you swore you'd never lied to me
so i know you spoke the truth
when you said I'm yours and you're mine this time
{bcg}

I often wonder if I am detached from myself.
Maybe I am too in-tuned to the moon.
I'm the rose that became fully bloomed under the sunlight of noon.
I took my doom and ripped into two.
I shatter my pride but ironically,
my pride told me to put it back with glue.
Who knew that I would walk in these shoes,
blood pumping through my hopeful heart and I'm singing the blues.
The way my soul moves, I swivel in and out of the grooves of the wounds that you can only see in my eyes.
I see the world like you'll see my demise; beautiful immortality saying her softest goodbyes.
When I cry, doves hear me.
I flock with the birds over the clearest water,
and it sees right through me.

Live like an unappreciated stranger
in your own house.

Become the careless talk at family dinners
about the disappointing child
and pretend like it was all a joke
and slowly lose yourself with every
echo of drunken laughter.

Look into the eyes of someone you love
and realize how you can't feel anything
other than dread.

Become the lustful thoughts of someone
you can't love
and watch them cut themselves
into pieces for you, when
in the end
all you can say is a pitiful "thank you,
but I'd rather be a lonely wreck
drifting across the sea."

Ask yourself to be found
in a map with no direction
and with nothing but your
faulty heart to guide you away
from home.

Pretend like the music
disappears into the background
of the screenplay your life has become
and the screen slowly turning black.

Find the dread
in your own heartbeat.

Take off your clothes
and see how you sewed every misgiving
into your skin like a story you
never want forgotten
and marvel at how bad your stitching is-
can't even hold yourself together.

Hear the sound of the rain
and wonder why
the grey clouds of your heart
never go away with the same.

Why can't we have meaningless talk
the way people have meaningless ***-
you would crash over me into a
river of un-scathing emptiness
and leave marks on my skin-
stories that this was where
you started to tear at
the seams
effortlessly
like the silkness
of your sorrows on my floor.

You would become a sultry verse
in this anthology of every day
lodged between the rush and
vacancy of broken hearts
and anguished limbs.

You would radiate the heat
of your angry, angry heart onto
the cold deadness of mine,
and we could burn and melt
all at the same time.

Meaninglessly you would leave
me out of breath,
gather your clothes
and go home.

do you ever wonder
about the difference between
looking at something
and the hallucination created
when looking past it?
if you look at your hand
it's all you can see
but if you look past your hand
there are now two of them
sometimes it's hard for me
to remember which is real
it gets me thinking
about how my father
used to wake me up
in the morning by rubbing
his stubble across my face
i spent my 11th birthday
under the assumption
that he might come back
if i drank his aftershave
like maybe if i could turn blue
if i could be his favorite color
on our bathroom floor
he would forget why he left
the paramedics were all sobing
as they pumped memories
out of my stomach
i coughed up the day the post-it note with your new address on it
burned a hole in our refrigerator
coughed up the day
the divorce papers came
and my mother
took a baseball bat to the mailbox
i've been choking on the splinters
for 17 years
it's been 17 years
since the last dinner plate
exploded on our dining room wall
17 years since my mother
started accidentally setting your place at the dinner table
17 years since italian night
at the restaurant on the corner
where the juke box
spat tired music
and like so many other things
it stopped working when you left
i guess it's no coincidence
since the juke box went quiet
that the cds in my car
only skip on "i miss you"
i've been hemorrhaging memories
for so long
and now that i'm looking back
i can no longer tell
the mirage from the truth
sometimes i swear
you showed up to my graduation
and last time
i was at your apartment
i can't remember
if the imprints of my hands
are in clay hanging on your wall
or if they were left in the mud
the day god had the audacity
to let it rain
or maybe it's like the time
i saw someone crying on a bridge
now that i think about it
i can't remember if it was me

gasping
on the brink of death
and i didn’t give a ****
you forced oxygen into my soul
you gave me a reason for living
you didn’t care
that i wanted to die
you justified my existence
you fought me
and fought me
until i realized
i can breathe on my own
there’s plenty of reasons for life
(you were one)