You make me feel
The love and the lightning
Fire in the sky
Panic and parade

Tin roof lullaby
Rain drip drop
Snare drum roll
One after another

When the thunder cracks
I go and hide
Inside myself
How can I not

I am so small
One single drop
Amongst thunderstorm

Someone older
Someone stronger
Someone more attentive
Someone different
Maybe you cared
That he is someone
That isn't you

And now she's your whole life?
And now she's your whole world?
I just can't believe the way you suddenly feel about her

Perhaps you should have been willing to change
Before she left
Maybe she would have felt more loved
If you would have shut off your play station
Put down your phone
(That was filled with other girls' pictures)
And sat down next to her
Looked in her blue eyes, that run in our family
And say "I love you, and I will do anything to make you happy"

But, of course, unromantic love
Is part of your red neck charm, isn't it?
Well, the closest thing you are to a charmer
Is a king cobra that will strangle you to death
If you don't play the flute right

You plan to live in your mom's house
Until she leaves for an old folk's home
You are such a loving son
And they always say
A man treats his woman how he treats his mom
And that couldn't be further from the truth

You are like a leech that ***** her emotional stamina
And her self esteem
Perhaps that's why she is self-conscious
And covers up her smile
Because you were the one that dimmed her sparkle
By saying "You spent all that time getting ready and you look like that?

And what am I supposed to do?
Comfort her and console her
And reassure her that not all men out there are like you

Oh, yes, you'll look back someday
At this moment that you are in
You'll wish you looked at her and said
"I should have loved you then"

My biggest fear
Is that you'd forget me here
Move along with my body
Leave my heart unseen

Intertwine your life
With who you think I am
Form sentences from my words
In the order you ordain

Be quick to assist
To the whim of a stranger
In the early morning hours
But forget I am broken

Do you ever look at my hands
Visually caress the curvature of my face
Trace the light with your eyes
And contemplate my being?

She seemed to have the ability to catch his eye
When he walked in to a room, he could feel her presence
She flourished like a daffodil in the spring and I wilted
I sank in to myself and was invisible

He would talk of her like I was not his entirely
Like he did not have my heart on marionette strings
And little by little, with every mention of her name,
He took rusty scissors and snipped at the fibers

He disregarded it all entirely, like I was delusional
Maybe he just wanted to protect me from what he knew I knew
What he tried to bury inside himself and hide behind his stoic mask
That old friend we both knew so well

I sat up and thought to myself countless doubtful days
"What does she posses that I do not? Is my love not enough?"
As much as I envied the way he loved her, there was never a second
That I felt enmity towards this woman that held my lover's attention

It was only a deep longing in my heart to make him feel
Even a modicum of the way she made his heart bloom
To have him run to me and want me in his life
Instead of coveting someone he only claimed to be his friend

In place of hating the other woman, I foolishly tried my hardest
To befriend her, to appreciate the same qualities in her that he did
She even invited me to something so I wouldn't hate him for going
I wish she had known me well enough to know I wanted to be friends

Over the years, I got stronger and wiser, but I still was his fool
The boy I loved so much could never reciprocate those feelings for me
He wandered and I let him go, to go chase what I knew he always wanted
But she did not desire him, and as mean as it sounds, it felt like justice

But time has gone far out in to space, I have lived since him
And she is now where I was, a life's love lost for another
In all of this, my only hope for her, is that she finds the strength
To not hate the other woman even though he loves her

It was not your fault he went away, he was never meant to stay
If it wasn't for you, I would have not known of his incomplete love
Thank you for saving me the agony of living my life with the wrong man
I pray you never give up hope in love and in life
Because someone better will come along exactly when you need them

Too poor to afford it
But too rich to qualify

A little pinch of guilt
A sprinkle of passion
A touch of desire
And a heaping spoonful of desperation
*For good measure

Sometimes I wish to hold you once more
But the problem with once more
Is that I'll always want another and another
Until you seep back into the cracks of my heart
You'll find your way in and you'll stay
Your touch will linger on my skin
And I'll feel incomplete until your fingertips
Lay where they lied once more
And I'll feel your strength behind me
I'd never want you to go
The problem with one more time
Is it never is the last

It doesn't have to be some huge ordeal
Not a clash and clamor of pots and pans
Or the thunder of lightning
It doesn't have to make a ruckus

I want that kind of quiet love
The one that sits next to you on the couch
But doesn't have to say anything
Because it knows that you don't always have to talk

I want that kind of love
Where you go to the same diner together every Saturday
Playing hangman and connect the dots
On the back of worn-out, faded pink and blue, advertisement place mats
While you order the same meal because it is tried and true

I want that love where you can go to the supermarket together
Just wandering aimlessly through isles
Deciding on what to make for dinner
Debating over whether $4.99 is a proper price to pay for Rigatoni

That love where you can sing in the car
Along with the radio
Even though you are horribly off key and so am I
But it doesn't matter
Music was never our forte anyway

I want that quiet kind of love
I guess what I really want is friendship

There was fire in her eyes and then the floods rolled in
The way they did during Noah's time, uncontrollable and unceasable
Her throat swelled and eyes leaked, a reoccurring problem
Of tedious persistence, of insidious intent
He was convinced she talked just to fight
To impress upon one, the beliefs of another

But I don't wish for you to change yourself
I don't want to force you when you need to experience the joy that you feel
When you know that every single modicum of your life
Is extremely out of your control, but you know in the deepest pit
Of your soul that everything will be absolutely okay
Because He is the one driving force you can count on
A single consistency in a world of uncertainty

The peace and the mercy you feel when you know
That all of the bad things you have done, like forgetting to give back
That girl's pencil in fifth grade to unjustly breaking someone's heart
Or something so dark that its magnitude weighs you down,
Are all forgiven, and all you need to do is come and listen
Wonder and ask, seek and you will find, believe in something for a change
See the brightness in Him that you have only seen through me

I can imagine us growing old, having adventures, going places
But I also can see myself lying awake at night, and feeling a deep sense
Of loneliness because that is the one area of my life that I can't share with you
I crave spiritual growth, and when you're around, I don't
I am lost between this world and another
Trying my best to straddle a fence between two lives I can't
I fear soon I may fall

I am happy for you
Really, I am
I smile for you and I am excited
When you tell me every modicum
Of how he looked the other day
Or your intentional conversations
But I cannot help but feel inside
Like it soon may be over for you
Like it was for me, it always was
And I never want that for you
I want him to be the one you marry
I really hope for your sake he is
I pray you never have to have your heart broken
I pray you never have to live without him
I pray you never feel rejected
But I know your man is different
You chose the right one the first time

Many times my heart aches and wonders why
But now this constant truth keeps echoing in my mind

The whole reason for every thing you did to me is clear
If you can't love yourself, you can never love another

You became so insecure about us
About the preconception that I would leave you someday

To find someone else
Someone more handsome
More thoughtful
Someone who wasn't you
That didn't have the qualities you hated about yourself

In me, you couldn't get past all the things you saw wrong in yourself
Even though I never said a word

I could never say I wish we never met before
Because you have taught me a lot

But, I wish I never met the agony you caused
I wished I never fell into your guilt traps
Your control techniques

You changed
And I was blamed for it

But I don't understand why
I tried to preserve who you were when we first met
That sweet boy who was genuine
Now you are just some fraud

Well, you reap what you sow
Because, now, I am not yours
You tried to justify our endings, to make it seem like it was my idea too
But the only reason I agreed
Was because I saw you were too far gone for me to try to ever love you again

I stood there
Costume still on
Flowers in hand
Excited to see you after my performance

Right as we met, you metaphorically slapped me in the face
With the words you said
With the way you spat them out at me
While I just stood there
Too dumbfounded to move

Then you left
You just walked away and left me there
I didn't move, for what felt like a very long time
Then I numbly stumbled towards the door

I pushed my way outside
And there you were
Walking away in the rain

I sputtered out sentence fragments trying to figure out
What exactly did I mean?
You turned around and told me how terrible it was
Seeing me with him on stage
How it made you angry and upset

I couldn't take you yelling at me
I started to lightly sob
Then it started to pour
The red lipstick smeared over your white jacket
Matched my firey eyes

Pigeons.*

I

LOVE

Pigeons.

Sometimes
when life gives you the troubles
You just need to throw up your hands and say
*What the ****?

From Chicago to Atlanta on the 5:45
I contemplate the fragility of being alive
I sit on the wing with a view of great breadth
While I dream about life and wonder of death

The sun has just set, the moon kisses the sky
And the atmosphere echoes its exhaling sigh
As darkness sets in, the graduation emerges
So I, in the sky, view its majesty in surges

The window is a frame of the moon as a crescent
And I spot a town way down, like a queen to her peasant
There is life, there is motion, there is somewhere to be
There is conflict, there are problems, and then there is me

I snap out of passivity like a casual thought
To locate the flight attendant complementary cart
Since her mobile vending machine is a couple rows down
I return to pensivity and stare at the ground

The tail lights of cars pulse when my true focus starts
As if they were red blood cells exiting the heart
There is a conversation I over hear from 27 E
The girl has dreams of studying alone in Italy

The man has a daughter and he rocks in his seat
They talk like old friends even though they just meet
There are young men in the Navy, and business folks
There is an air of community, peanuts, and hope

As my ears pop constantly and we climb higher
I think of my future and to what I aspire
And I wonder if there's anyone I'll see here again
Close and far away strangers, a view from a plane

You are the kisser of pigment on my lips
With your entrancing, dancing fingertips
You are the sweet surprise I seek
The strands of hair brushed from my cheek

I used to have a family
You know?
Back when I wasn't taken hostage
On your cold, ceramic tile counter top

And I used to eat real food
Did you notice I'm not a dog?
So feeding me mangled up, crushed bits of Purina
Doesn't make my coat shiny

I can remember a time when I felt alive
Instead of sleeping all day
Pretending to be dead
I used to be free

Then one day I was captured and sold into slavery
And you found me at that air-brushed T-shirt stand
In Ocean City
There you decided your life was incomplete without me

It's interesting how once we return to home
We forget about those summer nights
Wearing pucca shell necklaces
When you purchased me because of my superman shell

What is a superman anyway?
He mustn't be so super
If he can't get me far away
Far, far away from here

I have always wanted to
Tie a bow around the world
And present it to you as whole
But the hows and why's don't add up
Life is simultaneously illogical and cruel
And intricately absolute in its ways
Though it kills you as you live
With sprinkles of magic in the madness

I would love to give you everything
You've ever needed but didn't get
If only I knew how to retrieve time
If only it were my place to do so

Do I have the heart
To forgive yours
For hurting mine?

Like that thunder storm we watched at your place
Where I ran right into the rain
And beckoned for you to come dance with me
But, sadly, you refrained

You yelled and screamed for me to come back
Under your safe and dry front porch
"What if you get struck by lightning" You said
"Then You'd like up light a torch"

This was my act of defiance
My little run into the weather
I went out for you to notice me
To show you I wanted things to be better

Eventually, I  came back, dried off, got warm
We were together in your living room
Where we talked, and sat, and lived, and loved
While we listened to the thunder boom

They say time heals
But sometimes it's not fast enough

I think it's time to say goodbye
To Hello Poetry completely
It's made me laugh and made my cry
But it hurts me more, secretly

It's my 200th poem and it is the time
To stop writing to a void
To stop rereading poems of love
When I have another choice

My heart keeps hurting with every poem
That reminds me of you and I
So instead of reopening unhealing wounds
I decided to say goodbye

*Goodbye

I bet you are wondering why I call you that name
"The Other One"
Because at one point
You were my "Someone Special"

But we kind of fell off of the world
We fell far, far into the outer universe of space
Or at least you did
Because I felt I could never reach you
As hard as I tried
As loud as a I screamed for you
You could never seem to hear me

Do not get me wrong, this is my fault too
I did some things along the road too
And I am really sorry for those things I did
The last thing I ever planned or wanted to do was to hurt you
Even now I am scared to do that
I guess I just got so used to tiptoeing around your sensitivity
I became a gymnast
However, my greatest fault is that I'm not graceful

So wherever you are now, "The other one"
Wherever you are in your world
Whether you are floating around in the cold recesses of space or back home again
I just want you to know
That I will always have a space set up for you
In my heart
Some place that is warm and remembers what it was like
When we were on good terms
Because whenever life trips you up, I will always care
Even though it looks like I don't, I do

Are you scared of me?
Or what you have become?

What a fleetingly beautiful thing
I am
My own body
The way it curves and is hard
In some places
And soft in others
And I look at it
As if I could control that
As if I should try

I think on myself
Touch my skin
And wonder
What is this beautiful
And transient thing?

As much as I look around
This great wide world
I see you in every place that I go

In a boat at Maine
In a train in Boston
In a Jeep in New Mexico

But why do I search?
And think?
And search?
When I know no hope remains

It's because I had hope
Then lost hope
Then had hope, but lost
And all hope, to me, feels the same

We're too young, we were so serious
What happened?
Like Romeo and Juliet
Someone's going to die here
But I have realized something
If you don't drink the poison
I won't have to stab myself with a daggar

I want the noise to stop
The beeping
The rollercoaster
The constant
Raising and lowering

I desire the still
A slopeless line
The mundane to some
Would be an unbelievable fortune
A dream that I would be
Unable to pinch myself awake from
Because it would never be realized

I crave the quiet
Ubiquitous sleep
Of the unbothered

Sometimes being alive
Feels like too much work

I don't know how I feel in this moment
I want to explore it with you
I want to figure it out along the way
Stumbe upon it and grasp it if I so desire
Or if I don't, that is also okay
Just to experience what it means to be alive
What it means to be young and free
All the things that I feel don't have to be said
If I can't configure the words to say them
I don't owe an explanation for being me

"None of us escape this life unscathed"
You told me and I felt
My insides wilt, then cave

"We all break and rust"
But within my Judas body
Was where I laid my trust

I can feel myself slipping back inside where I was
It's a twisted game, to love and be loved
And normally the one who cares less
Is the victor
But I can't help but go back
To look back and think
To feel the same again
But you cut it short
You brought me back to reality
Even though you told me
You were stuck as well
Now I know why I can't believe your love
I can't feel it
You don't talk to me like you do
It hurts when you say goodbye
Like words could separate feelings
And if you are reading this, if you even want to hear how I feel
It hurts

Gritty, ***** earth
I would make a space
Defined edges and lines
A plant for every place

I would water it daily
Returning from a run
On the way to fetch the mail
Soaking up the sun

Divots in dirt
Turn to flowers in earth
And fruit within weeks
But for all that it's worth

I'd tend to this land
Nurture it with time
All to see you
Pluck fruit fresh from the vine

I set out at sunset with Spotify
“Ophelia” as my soundtrack
Trekking on the Huckleberry trail
As the sky faded from red to black

“Sirens” began and there I was
Looking at my ex to say goodbye
Unable to feel anything like him
Forcing feigned tears from sapphire eyes

“29 #Strafford APTS” sang and I recall
Wondering what and who he’d be
Imagining a man I didn’t know if existed
Someone who’d love and cherish me

I dreamed he would know me deeply
Love my quirks and intricacies
Know my hopes and dreams and secrets and fears
And remember how I like my coffee

I wished for someone transcendent
To make life light up like a rampart
Someone that liked to learn and grow
Someone like “Steal Your Heart”

Then with a twist of fate you appeared
We reconnected like “Lost Stars”
You made me feel so new again
Despite our past love’s scars

“Lay Me Down” brought me back
To nights spent miles apart
Long distance with the one I love
Empty arms missing half a heart

Sometimes we felt like “Two Ghosts”
Sometimes when you weren’t there
Sometimes we didn’t talk enough
I was left without your care

But it felt like “Home” when you returned
My cross heart melted when you arrived
Catching up on all the time we lost
An era of distance we survived

I’ve always felt this “Stubborn Love”
It cuts me deep, it heals me too
Joys, devastation, laughter, life
I’m living it with you

But as we’ve lived, at times I feel
You’ve been a “Cold Cold Man”
I’ve felt ignored, I’ve felt rejected
I have felt less than less than

When I encountered “Someone New”
It caught me solely by surprise
Somehow you supported and encouraged me
When you saw the sparkle in my eyes

This one I met was different
He came in like a “Happy Accident”
It was so easy to feel it all at once
My preoccupations up and went

My feelings for him did not begin
Because of your inattention
He woke up something inside of me
Something I forgot to mention

He made me feel new in a new way
Flow so easy, we were a “River”
Kindness and connection I can’t contain
The intoxicating alchemy of two givers

But you and I were not aligned
You didn’t realize the full extent
To which I fell into “Someone Else”
Into “Madness”, your descent

Now I am working to pick myself up
The future feels like a maybe
All of this occurred when I opened up
And that’s just “Wasteland, Baby!”

Your voice is echoing again and again in my mind
Had we really talked today?
Like nothing was wrong?
Like we still knew each other?
And it was not only for a moment, but for hours
We laughed and talked with friends and amongst ourselves
Calling each other by name
Saying funny stories
Mentioning teachers we hated

Secretly, I yearned for this communication
Because I was in the dark for so long
But I fear it
Because of my someone special
I don't want to get caught up again
Caught in your nerdy charisma
That seems to trip me up every time
**** It
Just don't let me do the same thing to my someone special
That you did to me
I don't want to continue the cycle
Of being caught up on somebody that you used to know

Being friends would be perfectly okay
If only it were possible