Johnnie Rae

Johnnie Rae Jan 2016

I woke up with stale wine on my breath,  remnants of New Years spent at my cousins and making a friend.  
He opened the bottle and it wasn’t long  before I started sneaking small doses  into my Red Solo cup,
hoping the other  adults wouldn’t notice, and if they did,  that they wouldn’t care. It was twenty  minutes
to midnight and I had moved  on to a wine glass. All the other adults  had
already had so much to drink that  
they forgot to care.  It was fifteen minutes to midnight, and  what was a full bottle was now empty ,
my head swimming, though my footing  still sure and steady.
Between the two of  us, two hours was plenty of time to  **** a bottle of wine, even if it was only  by ourselves.  
It was midnight and we were toasting to the life ahead of us, if not out loud  then surely in our minds.  I don’t think being happy is too much  to ask for, when the clock strikes 12.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

I Just Started Scribbling

when organizing my makeup collection
became the most complicated game of tetris
I'd ever played, I knew I was in trouble.
Organizing letters on a Wednesday afternoon
is the highlight of my week now,
and it's scary because I used to roam streets
like the wheels on a decade old Cadillac
begging for new rims and a paint job,
like a poor man begs for money on
city street corners. I am the cup he holds out
for the sympathetic woman to drop her
spare change into. I am only a fragment of
something greater that has not yet been reached.
I am sitting on porch steps waiting for the rain to fall,
because at least then I'll feel something, even if it is cold and damp and unforgiving. It will be better than
the emptiness of my head that has become clouded
over with Italian food, and even more Italian wine
I am a ******* statistic, a number.
I am mommy's one mistake that she didn't erase
from the page that is her life
she didn't plan for me,
so she didn't plan the escape route.
She loves me, but not because she wanted to.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

Brain Aneurisms

I never knew how to
write poetry correctly.
It's not like it comes with an
instruction manual
that reads in italicized letters

"dig so deep into your head that if a brain aneurism were to spontaneously combust, you'd be the first to know about it"

No one told me that my emotions
would corkscrew like falling
meteorites every time I picked
up a pen.

No one told me that the thoughts
would sometimes dry up
and leave me searching like
a dog who buried a bone and
then developed a rare type
of amnesia.

No one told me that sometimes
it would be hard to get the words
onto the page without tears
falling like a liquid avalanche.

There was no instruction manual
or italicized letters. There was only me,
and a lot of lessons to learn.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

Christmas Thoughts

Even if just for a moment,
I want to touch the most intimate
parts of your soul with my tongue
and taste what its like for you
to be with me.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

3AM

You make it hard to sleep.
I'm tucked under comforters at 3 am
with the image of your face in the absence of moonlight stuck in my head and I have never been more comfortable than I am
when you hold me up in the air as if
you're trying to show the
whole world my apparent beauty.
And then, you kiss me.
And smiling mouths kiss better
than ones that frown so I pray
that I can keep that grin plastered
on your face just long enough
to connect lips like constellations
yet again.
God I am a mess but I wouldn't have it any other way because
you are comparable to the
shining light that leads me
out of the gallows,
and brightens all the corridors
in my gloom filled head.
I wish I could whisper all of this
into the curve of your neck while you hold me but I can never find words
and form them into correct sentences,
rather than incoherent gibberish
while under the trance that is
the feel of your fingertips
I'm tucked under comforters at
3 am thinking about how lucky I am
and that's why I was late for school this morning.
I overslept dreaming of all we could become.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

An Open Letter to the Guy from the Vape Shop

I guess I could have put all this into a text message, but I wanted you to have something written by these weathered hands.
I swear if you make me smile one more time, my face will crack. My cheeks will split like chapped lips in winter air, and it will prove that feelings like this can hurt too, no matter how amazing they are.
You make me feel alive. It's almost as if you walked into my head, and told all the bad things they had to find another place to live. That my subconscious was no longer their place to crash. I hope that makes sense to you. If it doesn't, I apologize, as a writer I have an analogy for everything and sometimes I'm too cryptic for my own good.
The truth is you make me so nervous because every good thing I've ever experienced has ended in agony, and this is so good that I'm afraid in the end it might **** me. There's a gnawing in the pit of my stomach, telling me to run because it's never as good as it seems. But I ignore it, and stay, because I trust you.
I trust you so much it is scary.

The feels, man.

Johnnie Rae Dec 2015

Four Years Later

So this is what it's like to feel alive
it's nice to finally meet this feeling again,
after months wrapped in a cocoon of self-loathing.
When he touches me, my skin shutters like a tsunami just
rolled onto the coast of Jersey,
shaking the whole **** state.
Heart pumping electricity into my veins,
leaving the ends of my hair sizzling,
and a smile on my face.
Awestruck by the way he says my name.
It sounds like poetry.
He is poetry.
Hands caressing hands and
lips touching gently,
I couldn't dream up a better piece of art
if I tried for years.

I feel like I'm thirteen again,
staring into that same pair of
amazing eyes.
He makes me feel euphoric.
His smile is a sunrise that I
want to see every single morning.
The feeling in the pit of my stomach
hasn't changed.
He is still my kryptonite,
even four years later.