My life has become a countdown
Of moments I wish would end.
And soon I will be coming home
Not with a chip
But with the weight of the world of my shoulders.

Amen.

I am nineteen
And sitting in an over-glorified sports bar,
Telling him about my ex
Who would sip from the Devil's cup
And pummel my face
When he tells me
"You are too young to have dealt with that."

And I almost cry.

Because having been involved
In some serious **** before my 18th birthday,
I am afraid to tell him
That I have seen my friends
In coffins with track marks kissing their veins
And truly guilty rapists walk free.
I am ashamed to say
That I know what it is like
To have a person say to me
With no concern, only disdain
"Are you going to calm down
Or do I have to call the police this time?"

I took Atticus Finch too seriously
When he said to put on your fellow man's shoes
And walk around in them.
I have been on first dates in mental hospitals
And I became addicted to nicotine
By tasting it on men's breath
And he would be appalled to find out
The real reasons
I don't drink.

In a world where a year ago
I had to ask to leave the room and ****
I am now in a world
Where I am condemned
For not knowing where I'm going yet
But I will be dammed
If I do not know
What you're allowed to gift someone
Who is in the hospital after a suicide attempt
Or drug overdose.

Books, but only ones with non-controversial themes,
Shoes, laces prohibited.

It seems to me that they know
That my connection to this earth
Has become so frail
That even a shoelace
Could sever it.

His eyes are as young as mine
But he is saying these things to me
With a cigarette in his hand
And the weight of sleepless nights on his shoulders.
And I want to tell him that pain isn't relative
And what hurt me
May **** him
But I will not burden him
With the knowledge
That life gets better
Because I know he is hard headed.

I wonder some nights
If a shoelace is all it would take for him, too

And I almost cry.

I broke it off with the love of my life  
Two weeks after I started a second full time job
Which would have given me enough money
To rescue him.
When I had told him,
His eyes fluttered away from mine
Like a parent's would
And being twelve years older than me,
I guess he had room to look at me like that.

What do you do when the one person who you care about
More than Kubrick or living
Decides he does not want to
Put you in a position where
You have to take care of him
Even though you've always been the adult in the situation
And you've grown quite fond of it?
What do you do when not even a week after the parting
You find yourself
Growing attached to another walking disaster
Who's body may quake when you touch him
But who's skin crawls with the ghosts
Of lost admiration
Under your fingertips?
In a world where I was made out to be a goddess
I am now just another cog in the bougeouise high-earning machine.
I let love make me it's victim and now
I am the Greek goddess of regret
And I am fascinated by the way men ruin themselves.
He told me he didn't want me to have to be
The person who is constantly drowning in work
Just to keep our heads above water
But I would have walked to hell and back
Barefoot
If it had meant helping him and staying with him.

Today I woke up in the same bed as my new love
And when my fingers grazed his bronzed
And toned back,
I looked for your scar
And it wasn't there
And I panicked.

Tomorrow I will wake up in bed alone
And I will look for my own scars
And I will find them
Stretching across all the skin you caressed
And the heart you left in shambles
And I will rejoice in being home.

With whatever soundness of mind
I've got left
I will bind your pain
And level your being
So you may be whole again.

It occurred to me this morning
As I shuffled under the sheets of his skin
That if he was Fat Man,
I was Nagasaki
And if he was Little Boy
I was Hiroshima.

Because in the end
I will be the one with the disintegrated body
And deformed children of memories
And he will fly free,
The mushroom cloud of my soul's ambition
Billowing in the distance.

I'm a champagne bottle
Brimming with an explosion
That bursts forth;
Three AM, no warning.

Shrapnel.

I took to you
With the agony of lost submissions
Hot on my tongue.
Years have passed
And time had taken its toll
But today I'm certain
That if you were an angel
I'd snort the dust from your wings.

I've never seen someone as sick
As you were in my arms the other night.
What kind of a mother
Acts as a monstrosity
When the chips are down
And the thermometer reads 105?
I thought for a long week
That I was gonna lose you
And I'm prone to panic
But I promise that
I'll be brave for both of us
If that's what you need.
And I'll give up smoking
And crying and sleeping
If it means you'll be all right again.

I think of you
A moment,
A summon away
And I feel a trembling in my heart
Long displaced by misfortune.
Waiting may be synonymous with patience
But certainty not with love.

Blunt my sense of mischief
With your Christ figure mentalities
And I will caress the concaves of your body
With my Satanic, forked tongue.

There are more songs on today about suicide than love,
My beauty queen friend died of a ****** overdose
A day before her fleeting birthday.
A kid in my brother's third grade classroom
Hung himself "trying to be Spiderman"
When not even a week ago
He was trembling on the playground,
Begging for help when no one would listen.

Girls flash pieces of lumped skin called scars,
Proud of them because they have overcome.
But I guess no one ever told them that those scars
Were supposed to be metaphors,
A smoking gun at the back of a hero.

There's a kid in my class who picks at his scabs
And pulls his hair
And I can picture him
At the bottom of the bottle in a year or so.

We find more solace in fiction than fact,
Because 35 people were shot this weekend in my hometown
But in Megaman the shots never actually hurt.
We shouldn't be thinking about all the violence, though,
Because at least Miley twerked a solid and dropped it low.

A drunken fool killed an old couple last week,
But all I heard on the news was that Transformers 4 is spiking the charts
Even though Michael Bay directed it
And he can't make a movie
Without filling the seats
With people wanting to only see
******* and ***** and explosions they could see
If they looked down their own street at the right time.

Sometimes I get caught up in the mess,
Obsessed with those who post offense on articles
While we ignore the fact that a baby has been cured of AIDS!
I bring myself to wonder at the insignificance of you and I,
As bullets fly and young girls cry
Over slashes and stretch marks in their thighs.
If mirrors are out greatest enemy, than
Why are we fighting the bosses of our lives,
Ready to strike down the opposition?

Life goes on past all these insecurities.
There'll be graves to visit and chances to take
But I'm not the only one who thinks this way.
I can't be the only one who thinks this way...

So here's to Spiderman,
Who told us that with great power comes
Great responsibility.
Throw your fist in the air with me and face up to that.
We've driven ourselves to suffer far worse
Than we have to.
Fight the important battles and
Leave the rest to sand.
And come back to me,
Refreshed and renewed.

Bring my reasoning your weak and I
Will make them whole once more.

I've managed to draw my anger
Back within myself
In favor of moving forward.
Anyone who has ever shot an arrow can tell you
That in order to move forward
You must pull back.

I'm only interesting
To men who want to discuss Kubrick
And **** after.
In a world where we expect our lovers
To pull themselves under the influence
And sodomized freely,
I expected mine to rise above
And he did.

What was it like
Bleeding out into your wedding dress
When the wounds cut too deep to bear?
Fighting back our urges to help,
We instead flocked to the funeral
Where the beer was free
And finger foods flooded our senses,
Immunizing us against your cries.

In a world where he accepts me as his prodigy
Instead of his lover,
I live in a chasm of ignorance.
I look up to him as anything;
My hero,
My love,
My place of enchantment,
Though he looks upon himself
As nothing but a loser
And a failure.
In a life of looking up,
I've seen quite large men and women
Shrink when challenged
But I have yet to see him falter.

When the police came to get me
There was no force, but tons of crying.
If you've ever felt what I felt in that moment,
I hope that you had the sense
To put a bullet in your head.
Six kilometers East and another seven South
A baby no one loved was being born
And a young woman's innocence was being stolen
Through a paraphysical form of ****.
I stood shrieking on the corner,
Mouth agape.
And I got in my car that night
And I took nothing but right turns
All the way to the nowhere I was inching towards,
Trying to see if that myth about the world being flat
Was true.
I wanted only to see for myself
That driving a long enough distance from home
Would eventually drive me over the edge.

A man at my local zoo
Once showed me how snake venom
Effected human blood.
While dripping a drop of the acrid mess with one hand,
He held a small container of life in the other
And with a drop and a swirl of his wrist,
The blood was coagulated
And obviously unable to flow.
In that moment I knew
That love
Was the venom
And I
Was the blood,
Slowly congealing and
Falling at my only purpose:
Staying alive.

Other women
Have never posed a threat to me.
Maybe it's the spring in my step
Or the way I wear my hair,
But men can never get enough of me.
The way I walk
Has never been graceful
But I have always tread on hearts
With love at first
And destruction second.
Yes, it's true,
Men can never get enough of me.
The switch of a film reel,
The spring in my step,
I've never had trouble
Finding a person
Who lusts for me.
With the wiseness of an elder
And the recklessness of a droog,
Men can never find their fill.

I couldn't trick myself into loving you,
Just as I couldn't bear
To bring rhyme or reason to my writings.
Trochees and caresses
Are for *******
Who don't know how to deal
With chaos and rejection.

He had told me that my smile
Was warm enough
To melt the ice caps of Antarctica.
And so when he left me,
I bought a plane ticket
And as I stood before that colossal giant
Of an ice cube,
I smiled.

And nothing happened.

You are a mystery,
Twisted into blue veins
And around my left ring finger.
I am solemn,
An undisturbed rambling
From your selfish heart.

We crashed into this world
Punching and Kicking,
A promise and a fortune clenched hard
Between our teeth.
I've been a sinner and a beast before,
A lost meaning in a world full of lies
And policy haters,
A ****** for experience
With a blood lust for love and life.
I've never been one
To try new things
But I've found comfort in those
You've brought to me.
Within all the lies and misfortune,
The world seems brighter through your eyes
And I thank god every day I awaken
That there are people like you alive.

I've wanted to read a happy book
For quite some time now
But every time I crack the spine
Of a book with a grin escalating steadily,
I find that the stories that make me happy
Are the same ones that destroy my friends.

And I've wanted to write a happy poem
For just as long
But my hand always stalls.
No one wants to read about love and tenderness
When they're suffocating in their own right.

I've got a list of songs
About how this started,
Ranging back a month or two.
And when I give them all a listen
In a straight line,
I can't help but think of you.
You'll hit your friend
And go to hell
If it won't cost you a dime.
You'll wish me well
And drink to me
But I can't make you mine.
I'm tired of settling
For milquetoast men who cause me pain.
Every time he looks at me,
I see you staring back in vain.
He only wants to **** me
And maybe **** me up.
And I'm convinced he's only human
When ***** fills his cup.
And in spite of all the danger,
I'm gonna stick around.
Even if that ******* on his bike starts
To weigh me down.
Cause I can't turn back now
And I can't change the past.
And I can't make sure that that last relapse
Will surely be your last.
But I'll stay with you
And bargain through
Til this day fall south.
And I'll lend my words
And fight with you until my teeth hurt my mouth.
What's on my mind is
I can do better
And I can find a guy
Who won't spend his time wandering around,
Trying to get a free ride.
They let you off easy,
But I can't do the same.
So *******, honey,
I'm sick and tired of playing games.
Like Lennon said,
we're playing mind games
And you make me feel that I'd be better off dead.
Twist my pain
And make it your own
And I'll do the same.
But the outcome for both of us is clearly the same.
We're both headed for destruction
But you will follow through.
It's gonna happen some day but between he two of us,
I would rather it be you.

I guess I'm just going to have to hide under my desk
Because every word, every second with you is like a
Nuclear explosion in my eyes.
They taught me to cover my face and neck
But not my heart
From evil weapons like you.
Burn another cigarette hole
Through my lungs
And hang me up to dry.
I can let you destroy everything
Cause I know you'll feel better
And destroying is easier than building
In a world where
I can't have anything nice and remarkable.
I'm dying alone in a classroom
Full of kids that understand
Until words like "alcoholic" come into play.
I know they care
But I know they don't.
Not enough to try to aid
In my recovery from these scars.
I've been called a *****
Because I like my friends as men
But that's simply because they seem to understand
A lot better than these ***** faced hoes I get
To try to solve my problems.
They sit in front of desks and ask me if I've done bad
And I can't help but to say "yes"
Even though I've done all I can.
I'm going to sink into oblivion
As I watch the lights flash and take over my thinking.
Anything is better than thinking
At this point.

You are going to find yourself
Hating everyone.

And it should come as no surprise
That one day you'll pick up smoking
Because that fat ***** you fell for
Thought you looked **** doing it.

Men will crave your lips
Not for kisses but for *******
And you will have to battle them
On every insistence.

You will sleep with a teddy bear,
Human-sized
Well into adulthood
Because there will be nights
That you are so disconnected from the world
That you feel as though you are floating.

You will be sneered at
By mental hospital nurses
At the age of sixteen
As you visit your boyfriend
For your first date
In Good Samaritan hospital.
They will see your youth
And rage inside.
You will waste yourself.
You will die and redeem
Within yourself.

You will fall in love
With a man much older than you
And suddenly
Thirty won't seem
So old at all.
Thirty will seem
Like a world your old soul
Could get lost in.
And you will.
And it will be wonderful.

You will become paranoid.
Walking to church at midnight
With the love of your life,
You will constantly
Be looking over your shoulder.

You will forever
Be looking over your shoulder.

This will become
A necessary hobby.

You will tear down your Beatles posters
And replace them with Wes Anderson ones
Shamelessly.

You will come to a point
Where you hate yourself
In a most incomprehensible way
But you will write a poem
And you will be paid for it
And you will pay your cell phone bill with the money
And you will be successful.

You will have your escape plan
But you will never use it.

You will never need to.
His charm and his wit
And the way his eyes sparkle when he sees you
Will keep you rooted
Even when you are ready
To book it.

You'll be subpoenaed
And you will hate it
And ***** over it
And you will have to stand trial
But life is a trial
And you will win.

It's always been funny to me
How parents are always quick to blame you
For their  diminished bank accounts
And stretch-marked thighs.

As if you asked to be a torn ******
On a drunken night.
As if you asked God
To **** you out onto this earth.

I have loved and
I have lost and
I've gone to church,
Never bore the cross
But I'm able enough to see
When I'm not welcome.

And I'm not welcome here.

I dangled my feet
Over the edge of uncertainty
And his words floated into my head:
"You are as big and as strong
As you want to be."

I slowly
Edged my way off.

I brought him to his feet
And he brought me to my knees.

The wolves did not leave me
Where it was they found me.
Rather,
They stayed on my heels
And tore away my flesh
Before I even knew that teeth were in my skin.

The other day I was called a *****
For loving the same man I have
For quite some time.

People are rather stupid
When you get down to it
And sometimes I feel as though
We are the island of sanity
Cast away
In a vast ocean of insanity.

Of course,
That last part
Could go both ways.
I am but a human
And your choices
Will seldom mirror mine.

It's always been easy
To see your spark
That causes the glowing embers
Inside of me
But it was always a temporary thing before,
A lovely thing I would tend to cling to
Even when the world conspired against me.
I am alive tonight,
With wires flickering in my being
And your absence in this bed tonight
Strong.
I was never one to succumb to love
But I will succumb to you,
O wretched destroyer of my walls.
Because of you
I have stepped from my comfort zone
Into uncertainty,
Into obscurity.
How vain it is
That I say we are the cult film
Amid others so dry and lame.
Classic rock music
Teaches girls like me
To stay away from men like you
But today I am proud of my
Stubbornness.

We walked home from church
At one in the morning,
Basking in the glory
That was love and
Being in love.

It's my duty to finish
This book of love poetry
But it's so hard
To do that when all I think of
Is the contempt I breath
With every drag of life's cigarette.

People **** me off
And I'm scared of talking on the phone.
I could once run miles
But now I'm dying in the mines.
Ambition was my strong suit,
My scars were my weapons
But I let love in
And changed for the better.

What are you supposed to do
When you're good at writing about desecration
And you're suddenly placed in front of
A communion wafer?
What happens when
You're so distraught
You're reading the Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book
Just to feel closer to God?

What is there to say
When you've gone off the deep end
So quietly that those who love you
Have got no ******* clue
That it ever really happened?

I've gone
From writing with flourish
To writing a novel
That only goes
"And then, and then, and then."

I've gone.

My favorite memories with you
Are by far the ones made
While dancing in your kitchen,
Sitting in silence in your room
With everyone else either at work or sleep.
I've longed for the calming ocean
To swallow me before
But never like this.

Whoever originally told you
That your eyes were angry ones
Was a person
Who had never seen love before.

I raised my arms
To greet the day
And I swear
I could feel God
Grab me by the wrists
And sling me against the ground
Again.

I've always written my best romantic poetry
When I was suffering
In one way or another.
Thank you
For taking the suffocating suffering
And hiding it under your pillow
While you hold me.

With a voice as grainy as sand,
I was told by many a man
That love was a curse,
A soft Gypsy hand stroke on the cheek
Endured by the lonely
And accepted by fools.

I can't rightfully
Comment on the color of your eyes,
The swiftness of your thought
Without remarking
On the innocence flowing in your veins
And the worldliness
That's only been present
In drifter gods before you.

Dearest,
Killing yourself would be easy
But missing out on the next Stephen King novel would not.
Imagine the ******* you'd never have,
And the video games you'd never play.
They just put Megaman in the new Super Smash,
So he may be getting a new game soon.
Think of how many viewings of Back to the Future
You'll miss out on,
The indie concerts you'll never attend.
I want you to picture your perfect, glowing effigy of manhood
And now I want you to see him
Caressing your cheek
And pressing his lips all down your spine
Because this time two years ago
I wanted to be in a hole
With maggots eating my skin
And now it is lit on fire every night
By his touch.

Don't think of your family,
Your friends,
Think of yourself.
Be as selfish as a member of AA
And as resilient as one, too.
For I have felt the hot breath of depressive temptation
And anxiety bubbling in my tendons
But I overcame.
And even if no one else says it to you today,
I believe in you.

Think of all those cups of coffee with cigarettes
You'll be missing out on
And you'll never get to read the sequel to Fight Club
That's coming out soon.
Remember the book stores you'll never smell
And all the record shops
You'll never get to laugh at hipsters in.

Breathe and keep breathing
And I swear you will live
And find beauty.

He loves me with an innocence
So far behind his thirty years
That it should be a sin
To call us blasphemous
As many have.
It's in the way he breathes as he sleeps;
He is easy and fluent in his being.
I am at a loss for words tonight,
Though I speak to him as he rests.
He is as still as a coma patient
Yet somehow a smile creeps across his lips.
These are the wonderful things to me.

Every minute
Of every day
I trudge on to make it to this moment:
His heartbeat in my ear,
My hand on his rounded hip,
Love in our hearts.

Number one
Smelled of Marc Jacob's cologne from Kohls
And he tasted like the cigarettes he never smoked.

Number two
Smelled of alcohol,
Tasted like alcohol.
**** Everything and Run.

Number three
Smelled like home
And tasted like fleeing dreams.

I'll take
Contestant number three.
**** Everything
And Run with me.

Time will come to pass,
My love.
And with it,
Our time will become limited.
I will be exposed,
As plain and unbridled as ever before.

However bleak and unstarred the night may seem,
I will always be able
To find my way back to you.

Freshmen year
I was involved in a play
About women in the 1920's
Who were paid to paint watch dial numbers
And hands
With green-glowing,
Radioactive paint.
The point of doing this
Being so soldiers could see their watches at night
Without giving away their position.
However,
After years of exposure to the radium,
The women themselves began glowing
And forming cancers in the deepest recesses
Of their young and tender bodies.

Before the horrors began,
The women had taken a trip to the beach
Where they ate sandwiches
And talked about the things that shined
In their lives.
And between the Rudolph Valentino's
And pearl necklaces
In the windows of department stores,
I believe they could also list you
Among the beautiful things they had
In spite of all the danger.

I'm a master at
Never finishing a job.
Like how I will never finish counting to infinity
Before my biological clock
Is done ticking and tocking,
Or how I will never be able
To stop loving you
Until I take my final,
Clawing breath.

I felt his hands
Tremble across the small of my back
And I knew neither of us
Had a clue what we were doing.
But we did it with such a fit of glory
That none of that mattered anyway.

I've penned hard-edged words often,
You being the only thing that softens
Them up.