You left your hair in the sink
I kept it there as a reminder
we were growing old,
that things fall out of place
and take awhile to rebirth themselves

You left your scent lingering
between my sheets
the familiar mixture of body heat, sly smiles
I left it there as a reminder
of our conversations,
the ones where our paper hearts
wrote tin can telephone conversations
through our arteries

You left every single ******* sock of yours
on the floor
tossed aside,
claiming they trapped too many feelings
inside them at night

Sleeping with feelings wedged between your toes
is the equivalent to walking between whispers

It never works.

You left your skin on the kitchen counter
between the sink and the stove
a reminder that we are always shedding the excess
that in six months we are sombody new,
something our body
doesn't quite feel comfortable yet

You left too many notes for me to find.
hidden in the crevices of drawers
under the matress
stitched inbetween pillow case threads
even inside the broken toaster
a reminder that anything can catch a flame

You left a lot of things in Oregon,
but you didn't leave your heart.

You took that with you.

A year ago today
I considered all too much
pushing down the steady acceleration
of my sixteenth birthday present

I don't remember much.
The song "Breathe me" by Sia was playing
national anthem of bullied hearts
white noise for steel crushing
breathless air

10 minutes away from my house is the hospital
I have timed it.

6 minutes,
no red lights,
or unexpected traffic

On April 5th 2011
I prayed for unexpected traffic
broken red lights
moments of prolonged pain.

I wanted wounds for a reason
inflicted by something besides myself
because of someone else

Instead, my sixteenth birthday present
drove me to therapy

45 minutes away from my house
35 minutes away from the hopsital

Okay, so it's technically already the seventh but I haven't gone to bed yet, so this counts.

My heart is an accordion
Inside it's many folds
are notes

from past lovers
one says
"I told you I loved you, i promise I didn't mean it"
one says
"why are you such a cold hearted *****"
and one says
"you give the worlds best back rubs"

together, these notes don't amount to much
they would make a ****** poem

a reflection on my innocence of how
to untangle the functionality of a relationship
a perfect precise image of my attempts
to figure out
how to be
and how to be with someone

I still can't figure it out.

But the thing about accordions is,
they sound beautiful with others
but just as awkward and lovely alone.

They say where ever your birthmark is located on your body
Is where you were stabbed, shot, hung or whatever other means
Of death are plausible in your past life.

I have come to the conclusion
That I am not human.
I do not have a birthmark anywhere on my body
A patch of pigmented skin different from the rest
This is both englightening and very very very dissapointing

This means there was never a low blow to my calf, a karate chop at my neck, a gunshot to my ankle
Nothing to symbolize that I once maybe had another life.

A life where I was the cracks in the sidwalk
or the wind gently stirring up chaos on days when I just **** felt like being noticed
or maybe i lived out my seven year old dreams of becoming the sixth member of the Spice Girls
or even an NSYNC groupie

I will never know.
I never emerged from my mothers womb
With a scar baring my worth

I was never blessed with a kiss from an angel
As other mothers told their children

I was never born with a birthmark,
and while this is perfectly natural.
I am very dissapointed, beacause maybe I was never given a chance.

Maybe I was crushed before I entered the world
A womb filled with disgust and hatred

Maybe I preferred to stay as the cracks in the concrete or the wind
Because I'd rather deal with the simple casualities of life rather than the mess humans tend to create

Maybe I was never given a second chance because
I never made something of myself here first.

Or just maybe there is a possiblity that I'm immortal
and if that's the case.
You are all invited to my 106th birthday party.

I called them our divorce beds
Every night after we cuddled and couldn't
longer stand the claustophobic cover of our sheets
we found ourselves in seperate beds

divorce beds.

You slept on sheets covered in pink owls.
I slept on teal sheets covered in stars.
We were a twin bedroom dream.

Taking full advantage of a single dorm room
Our nights consisted of heavy whispers
Trains that fled our lungs and vocal chords
in search of the next station

Before sleep hit our barren chests
We'd lay awake and listen to our breaths
Sometimes mine turned into snores.
You hated that

Snores reminded you of your father
Something about expanded vocal chords
creating a symphony at night
scared you

Your father never married
Mine found safetey in a women
in a polka dotted dress
Who could transform his symphony of snores
Into an orchestra of love

Your father was bound by his only son
His nights spent in distress
Echoed a chorus of tears

Until he met Melinda
He called her beautiful
Words that hadn't left his lips since his son emerged into the world
A women full of desires and hopes
too large to fit underneath fitted sheets

You told me about her.
The way your father described the outline of her lips
parallel to the lines of stars that filled the sky
Her freckles constellations of undiscovered stars
Some nights our divorce beds
Felt too close for comfort, and
you would disspear in the morning
Claiming there was monsters in the walls
and that my snores were your fathers

You loved your father
A man who kept his word
Even when his life wedged tradegy into his veins
and his heart wanted to collapse into the inside of his chest
Your love for that man
could never be compared to anything

My father
Foud his life strewn apart into carefully
strung pieces of literature.
Words lulling women into the secrept compartments of his home
With authors no one had even heard of
Except himself.

The only advice my father only said was
“Two wrongs don't make a right”
But it is so hard
When you are throwing rocks at my glass house of confidence
I would shout

Shattered by your slurrs
Skipped rocks don't even miss
the walls that were carefully sculpted
into beautiful stained glass

My father was an artist
I told you about how his conductor
was a women with lips blood red
and kisses so sweet they could make his canvas bleed

You laughed
The differences between our fathers
Two men who believed in two different things
Two men who were in a constant search
for something other than the normal routine

As you laughed underneath your **** pink owl sheets
You told me to hurry up and fall asleep
You felt better listening to my breathing pattern lullabyes

Sometimes when those lullabyes turn heavy
and my chest rattles beneath my teal starred sheets

Please don't leave.
Don't flee.
There is too much hope living under our
divorce beds.

Sometimes, when bad thoughts plauge my mind at night
I shake my head
in a rapid succession of movement
my attempts to empty the excess

Every night of my childhood
I made a Vegas worthy deal with my father
He took my worries at night
and I took his

He claimed us the biggest worriers on the earth
Dubbed me queen of the Worry Wells before
carefully placing a kiss on my forehead

You see, forehead kisses
were my fathers attempt
to **** out the unseen youthful damage
of a brain constantly panicked with worry

Every night of my childhood
my father left me with his suitcase of fears

I was always too worried to open it

My fingerprints tell a story
on occasion I'll glance down at them
Careful yet unobtrusive rings of life
Much like the tree that grew in the yard
of my childhood home.

Tonight these circles within circles
trace the outline of your body.
Your spine.
Your hip bones.
Your ribs.
Every muscle tense and then relaxes
under the strength of my extremities

I'm horrible at saying goodbye
I'd much rather lie here and
outline your body for you.
My fingers the chalk outline at a crime scene

Fugitives are always careful about fingerprints.
They're easily picked up by white dust
and foreign gloved hands

But this time, I'll leave my ringed prints behind
I want them to know I knew you.

When you told me you were leaving
I had practiced the path of which my
fingers memorized the curvature of your spine
and your ribcage.
That way your memory would forever be in my fingerprints

The week before you left. I watched you
carefully,
And then all at once as you threw
yourself against the wind.
The way you tried to absorb into the clouds above you.
You just wanted to go home.

As much as I wished, you would never call my arms home
Instead they were a nose that was ever tightening against your pale skin
Too tight but too loose.
I just wanted to love you.

5 days before you left.
You told me we were better off without each other.
That I was merely a past memory.
The nights we spent limbs oustretched and entangled meant nothing.

But you wrote me my first love letter.

Slipped under my dorm room door
Softly like a midmorning whisper or a kiss goodnight
Just fast enough to be seen by a fleeting eye or felt by a barefoot
You told me you had no idea we would turn out like this.

3 days before you left.
I laid awake in both disbelif and awe that someone who was once so close
Could stop and then suddenly restart my heart again and again
until finally it lulled itself back into a chaotic slumber.

The day you left
I refused to watch you leave from the rearview mirror
Everyone knows you only look through that mirror if you want to watch something dissapear.

My blind spot was way to thick
And my tears were traces of past memories that were yet to be written
I was too selfish to even aknowledge the simplicity of a goodbye

But you wrote my my first love letter.

I want a tattoo of your heart.i want it on the sleeve of my ****** skin.

And when you see it for the first time
I want you to immediately recognize it as yours.

Something out of place
taken out of your body
placed on the skin of someone
you have long forgotten

as some sort of remembrance piece

As even though it's still beating
your heart lays heavy on someone
else's skin for a change

A piece of thick flesh
with a distinct function
of that to only serve your body
not somebody else's

Today I saw a boy cry.
Not a boy
A man.

He was 27.
He talked about how the power of words made life difficult
That the "I do's" he once shared with his wife were strange words
How his daughter would never understand him

You see all of the words he ever spoke were
long and broken
He never had a complete thought leave his scattered mind
because of this he cried in the uncomfortable silence

In the middle of WR 213,
about his own free write

I'd never seen a boy cry before.
I mean a man.
I'd never seen a man cry before.
It was uncomfortable, but i'm not ashamed to say that it all made sense.

Every morning I look at the same **** skyscraper
Nothing changes about it
Except the lights

Sometimes four lights on the top are on
Once in a while 2 on the bottom
Never is the entire thing illuminated

Why can't everyone be home at the same time
I always wonder.

4.9.12
(no idea what this is really, just wrote it after writing a horrible psychology paper)

I always wake up in circles
The imprint of my motionless
body worn craters between sheets
I never sleep under.

On a nightly basis,
I'm fearful of tucking myself
between basic layers of cotton

swaddled between thin air
and thoughts I don't understand
falling too slowly amidst
scattered mind conversations

In the morning, I'll be confused
by the emotions that lay
in-between the pocket of untouched air

when courage kisses my shoulder blades
i'll leave the abyss that my quilt has created
still fearful of those **** sheets
that have hidden themselves so quietly
beneath the imprint of my body

The first of thirty and the first time I've ever comitted to something I find very important.

Beneath my chest are two parachutes
On a daily basis the expand themselves,
with each breath.

Moving in a synchronized fashion, togther
they support the same body.
Never does one think of the consequence,
often embracing the heat of a cigarette
or the medically created air of an inhaler

My lungs
They make the best parachutes

Capillary kite strings,
perfect precision of movement
between the fine lines of the atmosphere

Kite strings that are often and only severed by a blunt force trauma
that, waking up feeling of getting hit by a truck
too many cigarettes between nervous conversations with a ghost

or the constant reassurance between inhalations that sometime soon,
my heart will beat again like it used too
for something that matters
instead of something that should matter

My lungs make the best parachutes
never ceasing to stop their rhythm
constantly supporting the downfalls.

sometime between
the morning sun
and afternoon air

we would sit between
the two trees
in my front yard

the white picket fence
shadowing our faces
while you braided my hair

for each twist of honey colored hair
you would whisper

carefully building the foundation of my youth
tucked between flowers
and lullabies
it was always accessible

until your words would form
a different melody
of sweet plaited kisses
deep inside the strands
that made the summer
seem as long as the braid
swimming down my back

April 2, 2012.

The only thing I am capable of drawing
is a city skyline.

Anonymous configurations
buildings I've never actually seen before.

Everytime I was handed a writing utensil
and a smooth wriing surface
my hand would flow into the careful rhythm
of drawing parallel lines

some buildings were topped off with triangular party hats
others remained flat
a place for the horizion to rest upon

This started at a young age.
Somewhere between eight and twelve.

My body began to itch for a city
that was overcrowded with the heat
of dream driven bodies

A constant ticking of an alarm clock
that would never understand
the word snooze

Tonight, I am reminded of this feeling.
The worn out, drugged feeling
unsatiated with drawing the familiar pattern

A feeling I've constantly felt
but a skyline I've never seen

Upon finding pictures of your ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend kissing

1) Remind yourself that he is a ****** kisser, that the first time he kissed you
was in the sketchy part of town
(he told you to hide your purse underneath his car seat)
and he kissed so oddly passionate
that he might as well of taken your tonsils out

2) Remember that his idea of a perfect date night consisted
of him sharing a 69 cent soda from Mcdonalds and
devouring a plate of onion rings like it was the 2010 world eating championship

3) Remember that food was all he liked to eat.
Nothing else.

4) When you see this picture, recognize that he is in something
other than his favorite maroon t-shirt.
Realize that maybe his new girlfriend, taught him how to do laundry,
maybe she even bought him cologne.
Instead of sheepishly leaving it on the hood of his car as
a friendly reminder that smelling decent is an important factor
in a long lasting relationship

5) Remember the nights your father paid him $40 to
take you out on a real date

6) Remind yourself that the $40 dollars was spent
on **** and a movie
you both don't remember watching

7) Remember that he was your first love,
that nothing more powerful than your two bodies
making out in his run-down car
behind the giant bush in front of your parents house
was once the most important thing in the world to you

8) Realize that maybe this new girlfriend of his
fits all of the qualities he found difficult finding in you.

9)Realize that he likes her, and he's falling in love with her.
The picture clearly shows it, he's falling in love again.
Pray for that girl

10) Pray that when he looks her in the eyes
for the hundredth time that when his lips part
and he whispers, "i love you"
that this time around, he'll actually mean it.

I could swear you have a twin.
I see him on every ******* street in Portland
It's funny though, because you hate the rain.
Before we both left for college you cursed the North West, Portland.
Telling me every bullied kid on the playground, math class failure, teens with feverish hearts that can only be cooled with rain water, the depressed they're the ones who move to a place like Portland.
The depressed want to have an excuse for why they feel and what better atmosphere than a city that has some ten odd bridges to jump off.

I hated that you mentioned the word depressed.
Through our seven months and 12 days of our relationship I was what my psychotherapist deemed as depressed.
Cracked rib bones that lodged themselves into my heart, inclosed between broken lockets and love me nots, wrapped in a blue cellophane.
No cocktail of medicine could piece back a broken sculpture

For 2 and half years, my best friend was a razor blade.
Rough around the edges, easy to toss aside.
She was the perfect companion
A stunning rectangular reflection
Of a girl longing for someone to tell her
You are the first sun of the summer, the perfect combination of cigarettes and alcohol, coffee at 4 am on a foggy morning.
Your freckles reminiscent of summer skies
Constellations still yet undiscovered

Someone to say, I will be your best friend.
Even when the world protests against you and the barbed wire between our hearts create a fence that is prison worthy
I will not escape you, the only thing I plan on murdering is your relationship between you and that blade. You cannot call that a friendship, darling.

I wish I could say this person existed and instead of creating his own story within my head
He had weaved himself between my cracked rib bones, stitched his striped sweater strings into my slit wrists, murmured beauty into my ruptured ear drums.

That he carefully molded the mercury consistency of my heart into a plastic masterpiece
Something that wouldn't shatter easily he said

I got to thinking this because I though I saw you again
Somewhere between two narrow city streets
Our veins outstretched towards one another

I followed you for two **** street blocks,
waiting for you to recognize your familiar catastrophe the one with the plastic heart, walking in the direction of something hopeful.
Some place the depressed called home.