im sorry i lived
and continue on living
with screws to hold me

i can take pictures of the sunset again
i can ****** up a moment and hoard it as a memory
i can die
i want to
i want to

when will the sunset end
moments are forever when your eyes have gone
to glass in your head

my head hurts and the pills didn't make me sleep
i can't wait for this sunset to ******* end

nothing is must be are is when nothing
but nothing is felt and seen and touched
and felt and tasted and by ******* god
touched
with things that cling
and bear down on skin like teeth
and gum and jaw and little things
that **** through skin and let you know
they're listening and
touched and felt and
******* seen

i do not only grow
up

i grow out and around and
over myself like a ****.
i grow in ways that contort
and confuse and construe.

i do not only grow
up.

i grow in ways that begged to be pruned
and i grow downwards into the below.
i grow set and seated and still.

i do not only grow
up.

i grow and grow and grow
and i can't tell if ive grown any taller
but i think that is ok.

they have trimmed me and stemmed me
and tried to pull me from my place.
but that is ok.

i do not only grow
up.

what do you do when the light at the end of the tunnel is there ?
i always tell me to get there but never what
to do when im standing in it ?
what do you do when it's too bright to see ?
when my pupils burn and strain and stretch like skin ?
what do i do with all this light ?
and the tunnel left behind me ?

flecks in my ***** that look like pine needles
ever mean ever green ever
pouring out of me

i hope you keep hurting
but that hope
means I have to
too

w h y am i
c r y ing

you told
me
i was handsome and i said
thank you
for lying.

you were so kind
and so bright

sleeping means tomorrow
and i can't let that happen.

somehow i will master time.
somehow I will live in the inbetween

somehow this cigarette will last
forever

wanted: someone to **** me

i want a written proposal on how you'll do it.
slow or quick, brutal or neat, personal or impersonal.

will you touch my organs? be the last man inside me? will you play around with my gut full of moving parts? will you take ******* and dip them into the ****** glaze and press them to your lips to taste?
i might like to die like that. it might be easier to see someone possessing your physical heart. at least then it doesn't have to live inside you.

tonight is the first night i have truly felt crazy

and then i cry! oh do i cry! and it is written like this! oh it is written!

i am scripted and i follow it with solemn diligence. the lines of tears are angling down my face so precisely. yes! i am crying! and no one is coming to calm me down!

this freedom. this blissful terror of the waking and unsleeping, the unseeing, the unknowing. there is no kind hand to touch me, wipe me clean.
just the back of my hand, smearing and swiping.
no elegance, no beauty. i don't need beauty because i am alone.

and i am crying! choking sobs that are ugly and uneven! yes!

and then i am done. and i clear the thickness from my throat and i turn off the television and it is silent. silent and silent and silent. and i am basking in the perfection of my performance.

perhaps ill award myself with pills. maybe a drink. maybe both.

a actor needs his beauty sleep

intimacy & *** are two different things and i know this
because i have always had one without the other

nothing is making me happy
maybe fall will see me content for a little while
before it gets too cold
just as its too hot
and the world will be too much
and i will wonder why
nothing is making me happy

crying in the bathroom of a mini golf place feels like a low

i like power lines
theyre comforting
like a mcdonalds or a holiday inn
you know wherever you are the same power
is pulsing over your head. the same that lights up your home somewhere else
so gaudy and bright.

i like the way they ****** up into the sky,
their many-pronged arms reaching and holding,
connecting.

i like the Orange lights that illuminate them at night
and the way they look against early morning sky.
they are a reminder of this connection. wherever i am i am not alone. i am lit up
so gaudy and bright

no seriously im a fake deep drunk *******

thanks for the likes though

this isnt art im just drunk

i am smoking a lucky strike clamped with old tweezers.
i am sitting on the back porch of my friends house
he is asleep. it is 2 pm. i am alone with the rooms of accumulated years.
i feel like an intruder. or maybe a burgler.

there are children next door screaming as i tap out the lucky strike into a dish full of his siblings.
i wonder if he knew them. there were 20 packed in tight.

i am wondering why i instantly personified a cigarette as male. i am worried for the implications of this.

i am hungry and still somewhat thirsty. the cigarette is drying my mouth even more but i don't have the will to rise.

a lawnmower has started up two backyards away.
i am worried for my strange superiority complex regarding suburban life.
i wonder if i am better than the mundane despite this observation.

my friends dad put his arm around me and patted me on the back. it is the most physical contact I've had with a male figure in about a year.
i hope he didn't see the discomfort.

i am writing a poem in this style because the matter of fact is all that comes to me. i am realizing i will probably never write anything worthwhile and spend my young years in the halls of retail: customer service. fast food. i will not travel the world. i will not take Polaroids of incredible things. i will only have my body to sell and the tasks that it can perform. my mind will be placed elsewhere for safekeeping. i am writing a poem in this style because i do not need to write something good. i am not a young genius. i am not a prodigy. i am smoking a lucky strike with tweezers, if that gives you any idea. i just want to write. i don't need to be beautiful. i can be an important ugly, a clunky tongued verse. a bad poem. this does not ruin me. this releases me.

rejected poems and ***** clothes on the floor

this is what i have to give. this is all i am.

melted ice cream. cartons swimming with fudge swirl and a loose hair that's found a home there.

the other person on a couch that seats three.

this is what i have to give. this is all i am.

forgotten nail polish thick with chunks. pasta grown dry in its Tupperware.

surviving to the next year. wanting to make it. when that ambition seems Big.

this what i have to give. this is all i am.

i was born blue & you were born yellow
& you colored me with yourself.

only that made me green
& you didn't seem to like that very much.

you asked me why i was such a noxious shade
& i couldn't answer.

i couldn't answer

i am early onset gum disease,
mouthfuls of pink spit lining the ceramic sink.
i am enough to warrant concern but not enough
to change.

i am skin stretched tight as a drum
with a living thing trapped inside,
stretching scars into its elastic prison.

i am ***** evaporating on suburban pavement
and the halo of litter around a garbage bin.

i am the stickiness of salt water drying on skin,
dribbling down and down and down.

i am the sensation of growing too old too quickly, of a rip in the seam of a shirt you once loved, loved, loved.

i am a nobody that is everybody.
i am so crushingly common and so
******* singular and i am the terror you feel
when you think of this.

i am lowercase i and capital I and grammar tables and the volumes of modernist poetry.

i am the twinge you feel when they speak his name
and hers and the ones who are just faces living in the corners of your mind.

i am touched and taken and drowning in liquids turned amber and sweet. i am gluttony and those six other sins which have never seemed so deadly.

i am speaking for myself, and i wonder if others speak for me.

i am nurture given living form. a product, a creature, a many-limbed thing.

i am all repulsion and vile intrigue. i am the
hall of mirrors and body cut in two. i am gemini sighs and red skin flaking free.

i am a half of a whole of a half that is
tired of completion and its worship.

i am a pilot, a lookout on the highest point. i am cracked lenses and falsely tripped alarms. i am the things that frighten then grow dim.

i am twenty and i am nowhere. and i am a living time capsule of things not worth remembering.

i am so disgusting and fat and ugly. i am a pig and a fat ******* waste of space.

i am bulbous and horrendous and vile. i am a massive mistake. my future will be nothing but pain. that is all i am made for. that is all i am born beneath. burn me in smoldering smoke. scar me in shallow deeps.

i am built for nothing but struggle.
that's my design.
i wonder how much i dream
up and how much is real.

i am nothing and so much skin.
pull it off me please

you cried behind the steering wheel and said you didn't understand
why i hated myself
my body
my being
so much.
you cried as if i could divine the answer in those wet trails.

i didnt have a word then.
i didnt have an answer.
feelings are so much bigger than words sometimes
and that was the only truth i had to offer you.

i cried too
but my tears didnt shine like yours.

i think i understand now.
i think i have an answer.

but i think that would just make you cry even more.

i miss the butterflies and all that other
lovey dovey ****.
they must've run out of air in my stomach.

i miss the feeling of someone taking your breath away
like a punch to the gut.
i miss my thoughts being consumed and filled and bursting.

i miss love
and wanting it.
the butterflies are dead in the pit on my stomach and i dont know if that's all i get.

i watch romance movies and wonder about
That Great Love
and if i've used mine up already.

i turned it off because that easier and now the switch is stuck
and for a while i didn't care but now
my fingers aren't strong enough. the fluttering inside me is gone.

it's gone.

this is the only way I know to absolve myself
and it's not working

there is no relief.

eat your words like a last meal that makes you sick

fill yourself up with haphazard and call it finished

tell her you want and then watch it shrivel like wet paper.

make promises that die like bugs kept in a jar.

watch the hands that once held yours draw away, slick with your sweat

realize you don't know how to ask for help.

smoke because it hurts and you know you deserve it.

ache because you're so good and getting it wrong.

hide because your limbs so fragile and boneless

sometimes her face is like coming home
and sometimes it's like returning to a burnt down place.
sometimes her face, looking down, looking away,
makes me hurt in old places. places that shouldn't.

and i wish i was ready. god i wish i was ready.

but it's dark and im drunk and im crying because that's the only time it's safe.

where do i begin.

how do i tell her that im nothing. a person made of smoke. and how do i wake up one day and decide im free. nearly two years down the gutter and im still there.

and he put a heaviness in me that pains me still. like old battle scars that all have stories i can only tell after the sixth beer.

and she's looking down away from me with her hair tucked behind her ear. i remember the moment exactly, as her eyes relaxed and swept across the page. she didn't see me watching her but i did and i wanted to cry again but it was too bright for that; she tilted her head to the side and i saw her neck and the collar peeking up through her sweater. her face was so clean and bare. i wanted mine to look like that. i think it did once.

god. where do i begin.

did you forget
holding me.
did you forget
the storm inside and the leaking windows;
i wasn't waterproof anymore.

did you forget the burn of fire in our throats
and the smoke we breathed.
did you forget the earthquake sending tremors through me.

did you forget how much it hurts
to have each nerve snipped
so you can hollow out some space for someone else
in your already packed-full chest.

did you forget
the hot summer sun and first love
and *****-stained dresses smeared with dirt.

did you forget the hard floor and the cricks
in our necks.
mine still hurts

it still hurts

im shaking a snow globe and all flakes are stuck to the bottom.
i can't make it snow inside.
the smiling statuettes are broken and there's a hairline crack that slashes across the glass.

it used to wind and play the lightest tinkling music
like a jewelry box my mom bought for me when she wanted me to be her girl.
that's all over now.
i think it got thrown in the trash years ago with my pink baby blanket and the arching ballerina doll.

i used to be someone's daughter.
i used to be a girl shook up in snow with music ringing in the background.
it's dead quiet now.

my thoughts are stuck to the bottom of my skull
and can't be shaken up and the music crank is jammed and my heart is a silent overture.

i don't want to be a girl
or a boy or a thing
with limbs.
and i don't want a girl or a boy
or a thing as fragile as those statuettes with fractured arms.

they're still smiling even though they aren't whole.
how do they hold their pose so completely?

ive never been much good at that so i just watch with admiration at the
art of the inanimate,

cracking a hairline smile that can't stir my eyes.

i don't think i can shake you any harder and i don't think i can unglue those tiny flakes. after all, that's the whole ******* point, isn't it?

what good is a snow globe that doesn't snow or a person that can't love or a daughter that isn't?

what good am i to anyone if i can't be whole or good or correct?
ive been playing at the art of the inanimate and
those eternal smiles and pointed ballerina toes.

i thought if i was quiet as a figurine--
i thought.
i thought.
i thought.

and I'm shaking
shaking
shaking

and nothing is coming unhinged.
there's no music.
the hairline crack has become
formidable.

I can't tell anyone still
because of the complications of
this grotesque girlhood and the *** that hangs suspended between us
so artificial and illuminated.
do you see it hanging there? or is it another thing
that can only be
and never act?

im getting better at this
art of the inanimate.
and this veneer of wholeness
and manufactured joy.

smooth down my body in poreless plastic and close all entryways to trespassers

and the womanhood that fast approaches can't find me and the selfish needs of limbs will be void
and the human desire to destroy everything it touches will be curbed
if just for a moment.

i want to destroy you with how much I want.
how much i want the snow to fall. how much I want to be baptized in the cold and kissed in a vacuum separate from the world.

our own dimension of mistakes and quiet
where both of us can practice the art of the inanimate
in peace.

i see you performing it too,
and your own hairline smile that cracks.

did you think i wouldn't notice?

i think the snow is coming loose.
i can feel it running down my cheeks.
and im smiling even though it feels wrong.

the thoughts are dusting over me and resting in my eyelashes.
i see them every time i blink.
she's gone and so is he and
there's more than i can count on all my fingers and toes
that have left.

my knuckles turn white.
my fingers tighten.
the world is glittering glass
that falls like the first snow.

i hope your happiness grows sweeter and sweeter
and each layer of dulcet pleasure wraps around
your heart like some great red lozenge.

i hope your happiness grows hard in your chest
like a too-sweet lump
with a liquidy sour center

i hope your happiness tastes like my mouth
and my bile
and my love for you powdering your lips.

i hope your happiness grows like a tumor
and your skin shrivels around it
while you wither in late summer heat.

i hope you cant sleep at night
and your heart slathered in happiness
draws every hungry bug.

i hope you have it removed,
that jawbreaker you call an *****
and i hope you choke on it

if i write a paragraph of
'*******'s
does that count as poetry
because i can't articulate much else
it's not an angry
'*******'
but said with a hitch in my throat
and red rimmed eyes and shaking hands.
*******.
i don't feel better.
i feel like im watching memories made into silent film:
the years and years that flicker mutely behind my eyes
astound me.
*******.
i feel like nothing.
I think that's the worst. im tired of getting chewed up and spit out and feeling like
nothing.
like i nod and smile and settle. im the cameo appearance in everyone else's sitcom.
im so tired of trying to be happy for other people
*******.
i want to scream it at you but that's not the person i want to be.
i don't know what kind of person i want to be.
i think
i want to be the kind of person that isn't so easy to hurt.
that isn't so easy to disregard.
that won't smile and try to make it right.
*******.
this is all i have after everything: a few piecemeal memories already rotten wth roaches and maggots. all the bad and the good going the same sour.
i spent so long trying untangle the wiring, trying to disarm the nuclear core.
i just want to be a safe distance away
now.

*******.
disappointment is a fond friend of mine and you are just another one in the long line of succession,
just like him.

*******.
im a person and im not going to smile when you hurt me anymore.
im not going to smile and try to be better than that.
im done im done im done.
*******

im angry enough to type this
but not sure if im angry enough to make this specific

im angry and i hate that i want to make it small and quiet
so that it might go unnoticed

im so angry because im disappointed in the people ive given trust:
already caked with glue and long abused

im angry cause i can't be ******* sure if this pattern of being wrung dry is more about them
or me

i hate them but i hate me too
and i war with being alone or otherwise a planet in their orbits of conceit
  what is my life worth? (i don't think the value is much)

i used to write such pretty poetry
but now it's plain and matter of fact.
i just want to ******* scream exactly what i mean and burn metaphors to the ground

i came to say im angry without particular cause
so here i am and im angry and
poetry doesn't do a ******* thing anymore

i sleep on top
of my sheets.
i don't need another layer
when i'm already burning.
i have so many:
glued to tendons, muscle, bone.
i wonder where i begin.
i wonder when the wafer-thin
barriers began to stack up
and when i became laden with them
i wonder when i got so fat with
fear
insecurity.
i sleep on top of my sheets
because i'm already blanketed
by safety.

i think the beginning is always like the end
a perfect circle meeting a familiar point that draws itself to
completion.
i think i'm always going to meet that same point
despite the illusion of forward motion.
despite the spinning sensation of change.
i think the beginning is always like the end
and that's why i'm here alone.
you can cast a stone on water but it always sinks
you can take a picture of yourself and
think you're beautiful
but it never cures the sickness that comes like clockwork.

i'm a circle but i'm far from perfect

you're a walking universe
and
all your stars have gone out

now it's so unfathomably
       dark.

smoking craters as planetary masses
collide
and
you there: remote, frozen
and held together with the gravity of your own depression
light years from any sun.

i wonder if every someone
is a universe spinning in
their own sphere of energy.

i wonder if universes can ever connect.

i look at you through telescope pupils,
flecks of dust catching light.

i don't know if our universes could ever touch
or if
we're both alone in the stretching constellations of our heads.

the parties and the drinks
and me stumbling and sinking in the slush.

i can't remember when but i danced with a boy:
a friend of a friend whose name escaped me then.

my memory is a dark pit
and i stare down in it trying to make sense of black.

he took me back to his room
i guess.

i woke up crammed into the edge
of a twin size bed with a body next to mine.

i've never dressed so fast in my life
fastening buckles with a speed i didn't know i had.

i cried walking to my room dressed in last night's shame
shaking with dehydration and an emotion i couldn't name.

i laughed about it like it was just another
joke passed around from friend to friend.

they said he was in a dry spell
as if i was a well in some man's desert.

i was a dumb drunk ******* a dumb drunk night
and in spite of my memory painted in swatches of black

no one said stop or no or
let's get her home.

there's a four letter word that sometimes comes to me
and holds me in his *****, ugly claws.

that emotion comes again like ink spilled on a page,
i don't like to think about it, to make it real

i don't want to be touched by a stranger again
i'm afraid of men's hands now

i'm afraid of men's hands now

My heart is pump pump pumping the poison and the pressure is pushing droplets through the spigots of my eyes. The air is draining from me, shrinking me even though I should feel full. I'm trying to fill up the silence with all of my violent noise but I feel like I'm screaming into nowhere.
I'm just howling at acres of nothing and waiting for someone to answer.

In the crosswalk
With a male voice hollering
NICE SHORTS
at me. I looked down at those
Two pale things protruding from my form like ugly, overlarge monsters.
I tasted the fettucini alfredo and pizza I had let myself splurge on after a breakfast of coffee and fruit.
I tasted the tang of sweat forming in beads on my forehead and trickling down to my lips. Little rivers of effort on stationary machinery, my body moving but never really going anywhere. I tasted embarrassment and my own weakness.
Maybe I was better when I was sick
With wanting perfection. When I wanted what my favorite band sang to me through my speakers:
A perfect body; a perfect soul.
Maybe I was better when i was sick and the fettuccini swirling away from me
Down down down that liquid rabbit hole that consumed my secrets
Maybe I was better than these fat legs
Crammed into athletic shorts
Maybe I was better than just
Some joke

i don’t even want this feeling
to pass from the safety of myself.
i would rather just
look at you and let a crush
crush me completely
than have to realize it
like i did before.
i would rather be crushed by possibility than
its death.
i would rather live in limbo than in
definitive
disappointment.
cause if i’ve learned anything in these
eighteen years
it’s that you’re kinder
when you tear yourself apart
softer
than a stranger who desecrates even the parts
you would leave intact.
i would rather look at you and think how
nice it might be to touch you, break the boundaries of social
propriety,
but leave it just an empty, unfulfilled
possibility. because i don’t want to touch, i don’t want
that tender, tender brushing of fingertips,
i want a **** to forget and a friend
to remember
and caring isn’t on the agenda.
so please just let me look at you
let me crush myself
before you
ever get the chance
to.

being broken isn't beautiful
and it took remaking myself
to understand.

sad isn't pretty.
it's just sad.
it's crying over the toilet
and drinking cheap ***** straight.
it's looking down instead of in the mirror
because it hurts too much.

broken isn't beautiful
and don't ever let a poet
tell you otherwise.
broken is just broken
so remake yourself with me
and i'll help hot glue you back with humor
and love.
you are not
destined to be in fragments.
you will be whole.
you will
you will
you will

i wonder if dysfunction
is learned or predetermined.

I woke up and slipped back
(into your arms with your cold hands
pressing flat against my torso.
You put your nose in my hair and I shook;
you told me I smelled clean.
Your hands were under my shirt and resting
there. Cold hands that burned like dry ice,
like the filmy haze of your eyes.
I could hear the catch in your voice
choking out while I trembled there
weakly as those cold hands
sapped me dry, dry, dry.
You said you were sorry
as tears rolled sideways down the bridge of my nose.
And you loved me then with your cool hands on curves.)
into a dream,
shivering with the window left open.

I dye my hair to be different
from the person I was an hour ago.
I didn't like her very much.

I take a picture or two
to memorialize my new baptism
of peroxide and pigmentation.

The chemical smell fades and the new
becomes commonplace
and I'm back to the person that I was.

And I'm fraying like the ends of my hair
and splitting and breaking and I'm her again:
just as ugly as ever.

**** college
you can't even smoke a cigarette in peace.

my life is a push and pull
between disappearing and
screaming to be seen.

**** college

life is like a song
cause sometimes there are
parts where the chorus hits
and it *******
erases all the doubt of life
before that swell of chords
and voices scratching against throats.
i've been alive with doubt and now the guitars are humming and the drums are steady and i'm screaming the words so loud
and everyone can hear me but i don't care
cause i'm singing the chorus so loud it hurts
because i believe it and it's real
and the laughter outside my door
is overwhelmed and alone is a
beautiful thing to be screaming
along with.

there's this pervasive idea
that love is needing someone,
that without them your world stops turning
and your lungs shrivel without air.

but i would rather
have someone wake up everyday
rising from their sleep and stretching
and smiling
and deciding to choose me.
i'm not their air, their atmosphere.
and they could go on if i was gone.
i want to be chosen
consistently and persistently
i want them to want to be here.

that choice
is our most definitive beauty.

i heard a song the other day that accessed
a private part of myself
and it unfolded out of me and wrapped itself
like vines around my bones, muscles, skin.
i heard a song that made palpable emotion
within me grow outward into tiny
goosebumps littering my arms.

that is the power of music,
art, poetry,
to make those inexplicable emotions free
and cover you in their shivering beauty.

it's 4 a.m. and i didn't study
those latin conjugations
no, i studied
the last few weeks.

i don't care if i've ****** a thousand men;
i don't care if i've ****** one.
none of you have the right to
make me seem like i'm unclean.
because if i remember correctly
it takes two bodies,
two sets of limbs moving in the dark unseen,
and two resolves to explore
the sensations of their ***.
and i'm expected to sit here quiet and placid
while you throw my sexuality in my face
and make this an unwelcome place
for ****** like me.
*******.
*******.
*******.

i'm a person; a human being
and stop playing nice,
stop playing dumb.
i'm not going to pity *******
because you were kind to me
a time or two
you pathetic *******.

you came at the wrong time,
when i was already seething so silently,
and you asked again and again
like a kid asking his mom for a new toy in the store.
it's hardly even you i'm mad at:
it's this systemic poison in the great pool of people,
and there are plenty of fish in the sea
but how many are free from this toxicity?
i thought *** was an exploration, a harmless invitation
to enjoy what felt so organic and good
but you're the ones who've made it *****,
who've made me feel like a ****.
who've made it your personal business to erase me,
and displace me
because i liked the touch, taste, feel.
this is unreal to me; and i'm sick in my heart.
because everyone wants to try and isolate
this one part of me
and simplify who i am into
the whims of my skin.

no. the answer is no.

so *******.