I just want to feel beautiful words
Drop them from your lips
Slick, and slimy
And sugar-sweet
Let me hold them
Close to my ribcage
And burn their characters
Into my skin
The pain is nothing
Compared to the emptiness
I feel when they're gone
I'll line my brain
With artfully worded lies
And plaster the walls
Of my subconscious
With pleasant portraits
Of a time and place
That never existed
Feed me beautiful words
Like candy coated arsenic
And let me feel something
Whisper sweet nothings in my ear
Like the empty promise of a faded tombstone
Gone, but never forgotten
Lay me to rest on a bed of wilted roses
And bury me in soil
Polluted by the labors of man
When the worms finally come
I will not permit them to lie

I only feel alive
When I'm driving away from here.
How many miles
Can I cover in one night?
Probably not enough.
Maybe I'll drive until I hit water.
Maybe I won't stop.
I have this recurring nightmare
Of driving into the ocean.
It's not hard to figure out.
The ocean is the best analogy
For the unknown
That could probably exist.
It used to terrify me.
But
Everything that I know is here,
And I don't care for it much.
Maybe I should take my chances
With the ocean.

I never heard the footsteps
I never saw his face
I never had any reason to think
That I wasn't safe in that place

I'd walked that path a hundred times
And probably a hundred more
To think I had only a few more feet
Till I reached grandma's door

It was cold on that day
And I wore my red hood
As I wandered out
Into the wood

It happened fast
My memory's unclear
There was a flash movement
A rush of fear

My clothes were torn
My mind was weak
My mouth was covered
Lest I try to speak

Then darkness fell
My body grew still
My hood was useless
Against that chill

*

I never made it to grandma's house
And I was never found
But, still, though they can't see me
I've decided to stick around

I pace the trails when it gets late
Lest some other girl meet my fate

So if you're walking in the wood
And see a flash of red
You'd best heed my warning
There's danger up ahead

you're pretty sure that the veins in your body
look like a roadmap of West Virginia
even though you've only ever seen its welcome center
I mean
that's fair
you're also unfamiliar with yourself
maybe you're just seeing maps in everything around you
because you keep telling yourself that you'll leave
and you're waiting for a sign
those runs in your tights look like highways
the lines on your palms could be exit ramps
and maybe if you pretend these are divine messages
you'll finally get out
because if you don't soon
you might never leave
and in 20 years you'll look in the mirror and think
"what the hell am I doing?"
and your reflection will respond,
simply,
"nothing"

I wish to be a statue
Frozen for a moment
For an eternity
Beautiful
And lifeless
And hard
Enduring
Strong in all the ways I'm not
And unfeeling
Untouched by tedious things
As emotions
Love, pain
It's all the same
Bouncing off my shell
Like beads of rain
I feel nothing
The weather may move me
The weather may change me
The weather may destroy me
But the weather is kind
Maybe this time when I fall apart
I won't feel anything

*Marble Eyes Will Never Cry

I keep observing life
As an outsider
How does one assimilate
Into a world
That they were born into

I've never been comfortable with permanence
I guess you could say
I have commitment issues

the irony
-of course-
is that my fear of making permanent decisions
leaves me in a constant state of stagnance

we're not meant to stand still

we can make a thousand marble statues
in an attempt to grasp immortality
but no one was ever meant to last forever

our cells are doomed from the start
when you deselect for aging
you select for cancer
and
-just like marble-
cannot escape the weather
we cannot escape out own mortality

I've never been comfortable with permanence
but thankfully
-I suppose-
I'll never have to be

The darkness has swallowed
All hope for reprieve
My heart beats are hollow
My confidence leaves
And though they know that I wallow
And they know that I grieve
Their darkness has swallowed
My hopes for reprieve

The monsters are coming
To take me away
I know they are waiting
I know where they stay
And the sunlight is waning
The day fades away
And the monsters are coming
To take me away

My debt must be paid now
It’s long overdue
I do not care how
As long as it’s soon
If my life I must lay down
I’ll leave it with you
For my debt must be paid now
It’s long overdue

You were so trusting
Your heart was so pure
Your dreams were of wedding rings
You knew I was yours
And I heard your soul sing
But I messed up the chords
But still you were trusting
And our love was pure

You never suspected
What I was inside
Because I had perfected
My tactful lies
Or cause you resurrected
My human side
So you never suspected
The monster inside

That night I remember
It’s painfully clear
Your pain like an ember
To burn and to sear
Your soul like November
Cold and dark with fear
Yes, that night I remember
It’s painfully clear

Your scream like a siren
Beckoned to me
You didn’t know I was the tyrant
That I was the banshee
I had the strength of a lion
But lacked sympathy
So your scream, like a siren
Appealed to me

All the love we had shared
Our life of fairy dust
Had I really cared?
Or was it blood lust?
Were your instincts impaired?
Or were they just?
Had the love we had shared
Dissolved into dust?

I don’t know, I confess
My emotions have dulled
But since your death
I can not be consoled
And though I took your last breathe
My misery unfolds
But ah, I digress
My soul has grown cold

My time has now come
I hear the footsteps
This means little to some
But I’ll try my best
Because where they come from
Those dark, soulless depths
Will soon be my home
Once you steal my last breathes

For now apart
Forever together
My soul belongs to you
Please come to claim it soon

it is 1 am
muffled yelling
punctuated
by a slamming door
children crying
a car driving away
give it two days
relive it again

maybe the makeups are sweet
but those happen behind closed doors
all I see
all I hear
is the venom thrown from a moving car

I often wonder if they thought their lives would be like this
when they were 16

Night isn't a void
It's possibility

It is the breath before a verse
The undisturbed lines on a sheet of loose leaf
A canvas still the shade of eggshells
Sleeping strings on an old guitar

Night isn't death
It's birth

A glance shared across a room
A tentative smile, a kiss, a touch
The first of many bitter drinks
Meant to wash away the mask of the Day

Night is freedom

You can’t read the rules without a light
And They can’t see you in the dark

Night is bass lines that keep your heart beating

Night is smoke

Night is gasoline and glitter

But above all
Night is the promise of escape
From the pretense of Day

When the sun is your stage light
And the world is your stage

When we are infants
We have no concept of object permanence
When something leaves our sight it's gone from our worlds
It ceases to exist in our minds
Over time we learn that this, of course, is not the case
It's a sign of development
It means that we're becoming functional humans
I can't help but wonder
If the idea of you left my mind when you left my life
If I wouldn't be a more functional human than I am now

I love deeply
But never in the right way
Please don't depend on me much
I never learned how to stay
I just need to know that
You will be okay

When the going got tough
They said
"Go west"

Maybe I'm just
Another victim
Of the American Dream

When I spend my days
Dreaming
Of the shores of
Washington

And
Running from
The Atlantic

New Jersey has nothing for me
This I believe

In a melatonin haze
Aided by half a bottle of champagne
I saw something
I never wanted to see
But now it seems
My strings have been cut
-It hurt-
-At first-
But I guess it had to be
For me to really be free

Maybe I can finally say
I'm over it

The stillness of my room
Is unsettling tonight
With no assurance that time is really passing
What is there to inspire me?

I lie in my bed
And take shallow breaths
If only I could be still enough

I kept telling myself
That all I wanted
Was to feel your arms around me
But now I think
I've become addicted to your touch

My skin aches
My limbs shake
My heart quakes

For ****'s sake...

I never wanted to need you
I think I want a redo
It wasn't you but me who
****** it up this time

Next time I'll try harder
I swear

She told me once
That she wanted people to write stories about her
But not because she wanted to be remembered
"I don't believe in God, you see,"
She just wanted her life to have meaning
I guess she didn't realize
That she could do that herself

For her 18th birthday
Her parents,
Who were good Christians thankyouverymuch,
Bought her a golden cross
To wear around her neck

On her 20th birthday

She sold that necklace
And told her parents she lost it
While pulling her shirtsleeve down
To cover the marks on her arm

On her 23rd birthday
Her high school sweetheart
Put a dainty ring
Onto her even daintier finger

On her 24th birthday
Her husband asked where her ring was
“Oh, it’s just up in my jewelry box”
She said.
Her dainty fingers
Had become too skeletal to wear it

On her 26th birthday
She gave birth
To a lovely baby girl
With one straw colored curl
That looked like gold in the sun

*On her 26th birthday
A woman in a black suit
With a court order
Took her first born away
She never knew the woman’s name

empty and glass
cold and fragile
it doesn't beat like it should
but sometimes it catches the light nicely
as long as it's beautiful
never mind that it doesn't work
hook me up to a monitor
and you'll hear nothing
but press your ear to my chest
and you might just hear the ocean