when my body bends
and breaks--
a flower stem
plucked from her
pretty face
i feel your fingers
pulling petals,
stealing smiles,
scattering pieces
of me on the asphalt.
is it my fault?

.

girl asked boy
what is your favorite sky?

boy replied
i only know one sky. how could i know another?

girl replied
does not the sky change face from morning to night?
do you mistake bloated stars for clouds?
does sunset's passion taste so similar to the hope of the morning's blue?

boy shrugged
if the colours of the sky change with or without my recognition, why should i waste my time?

.

i turn over in bed
again, feeling flames
lick my stomach,
digging fingernails
in my palms
against the pain
on nights like these
i forget my name,
forget why
the sparks in my eyes
leave me dry
and burning.

white noise. a fan.
the wind, curling around red sand.
clinging to your memories, your hands,
dripping like lost leaves in a lost land,
the scratching of time on mortal man,

can you feel it
in the back of your mind?
these are the sounds
we wash
and leave behind.

you keep asking me why i'm trying so hard this time and i don't know what to say because there's not a beautiful way to tell you that i'm scared to death of my own nature, scared of my innate inconstancy but even more afraid of the intimacy i crave. living on a pedestal isn't as fun as it used to be and now even the sky feels like another corner.

turns out i'd rather be in a corner with you.

you say it is a "noble thing" to "be the same person to everyone" as if that is a choice i know how to make. you criticize my defense mechanisms unaware you activate them in doing so. don't you understand your wise and less than well-intentioned words perpetuate the behavior you claim to hate? i don't know how to stop changing without changing to do so.

i guess i am doomed to displease you. my mistake.

i dont like the dark i dont like the dark i dont like the dark i dont like the i dont like i dont i dont i

dont know how to not lie or
how to always do my work on time or
how to laugh like i'm trying to not die,
how to stop saying half the time i can't breathe
but sunday nights taste like stale anxiety and
i dont know how many more i have in me.

am i sick of this or am i just sick of myself?

i've spent a lot of time in social scenes, and between laughs and looks and the way people look down when they want to cry i've yet to grasp whether i'm meant to shrink or stretch in a group conversation. eye contact seems dangerous sometimes. is a smile safe? how long can i listen without talking? how loud do i have to laugh to seem carefree? before you look at me and think of all the people you'd rather me be?

if i am supposed to love myself before you do why don't you care either way?

i guess i'll keep stretching myself to wrap around all the people i want to be, want to love, want to love me, and between my thinning hair and the way my skin looks after a whole day i'm less and less sure i'll ever be someone worth being.

i spend a lot of time changing, changing clothes and changing earrings and glasses and world views. my opinions leave me quicker than my eyelashes do, and i don't know how to stick them back on because false eyelashes aren't cheap but they don't sell fake opinions at the dollar store. i don't even know what currency i'd use to buy them---my energy? morals? creativity? all spent and gone months before now. i spend most of my energy trying to become the kind of person people like, or at least admire, or are at least intimidated by. if i can't care about you at least i can make you want me to. is that fair? does my loneliness justify the pedestal i put myself on? pride is my only currency left and i don't know how to diversify. at this point all i know how to say is i'm sorry, i'm sorry i'm constantly a changed person, constantly ridding myself of the baggage tugging on my skin, baggage that sits quietly until i am finally comfortable in my seat, quietly until it screams and i have to start over again. unclipping luggage was never so difficult as a child but then again i didn't have this much.

if you hold his hand and he doesn't love you,

i mean,
if you hold your own hand
in his
             if you love him and he doesn't love you
are you holding your heart together? is this
hard for you
yet

      i said never hold the hand of the boy who
cares
in all the wrong ways

i said these things
i said

be loved

i keep telling people
i'm bettering myself for myself,
to be the type of person
i would like,
someone i can be happy being.
really i'm just lost
and looking for anything
that could make me
worth loving.
i'm not enough on my own.

stop DRIVING me INSANE
i ask for NOTHING and you still disappoint.
i just want you.
you just want destruction.

firelight flickers in her irises
as she takes another step away
from the candlelit corridors
she used to call home,
when she was comatose,
when she drifted
like ashes in the wind,
like dying sparks
floating dimly
in a darkening sea--
like he used to look
when he looked
at me.

wisps of smoke
                    rising
from my knuckles and
                                       my thighs
                             i cry,
                                and i cry
          

                                              and cry

i love you like the polar bear loves the beach
wistfully, between a sigh
and early morning dreams,
scattered between autumn snowflakes
and flowered halloweens
with all the adoration of
a dying bride-to-be,
sowing kisses into letters,
tucking love into the seams.
darling, i love you
but it's not meant to be.

Ne verse aucune larme—Verse aucune larme !
La fleur fleurira une autre année.
Ne pleure pas—O ne pleure pas !
Les jeunes fleurs dorment dans la terre.
Sèches tes yeux—O sèches tes yeux
Parce que j'ai appris au Paradis
Guéris mon coeur de mélodies—
Ne pleure pas.

i hope my words scrape your throat when you say them to yourself. i hope you read this aloud just to see, reading and feeling them stick in your teeth, reading and wondering whether the pit in your stomach will ever cease, if you will ever kiss someone with ease, wondering if trembling fingers means death or just a life of unease, sitting and trembling and feeling darkness like a weight rolling around in your knees, reading words that scrape and stick in the pits of your favorite tees, rolling around with the grease and the laziness you need to never wash the pits of your favorite tees.

New York City is all existential lust and anxiety
personally,
all the words and phrases catching on
each other's faux fur coats and
the way your lips frame love is different than
mine,
and it's like dreaming
or a drug, dancing and dazzling from a thousand feet above
the skyline isn't as cool as they said,
it's hazy and gray (like your eyes), and
i love it

where do you go
when you know
you'll be blind forever?
how do you know
you are home?
is there a painting
with the confidence
to call beauty
its own?
when your eyes fog like glass,
when they become the mask;
is there a sunset that calls
the sun to rest at last?
when no color remains,
light and darkness conflate,
do your dreams become
shadows or drugs?
are they ever enough?

i know what this is,
this is madness,
this is craving for a touch, for the
self-destructive nature
of his clutch, these are
soulmates who only
want it rough,
these are kisses
and we never get enough:
these are chances
and we only get them once.

minutes falling and counting and
running away as i chase them,
laughing at my face, laughing as i
reach for them, whispering
what does she think she can do?
our lives ended before they began.
does she pluck time's harp strings
so well she believes she
can pull seconds into hours?
can she force heartbeats
from wilted flowers? .

sick!!!!!!!!!!!! shaky shaky
can you hear the paper in my lungs
like i can

i can hear it

i can hear it like i hear
the screaming of anonymous
mouths
in my obsessive
compulsive mind
i hear it like the
cries of a pummeled boy
who cries

do you peel skin off your fingers? do you rock back and forth
on the floor in the bathroom on the floor

why am i in the bathroom why did i lock the door????

you run from this i run from this
we all run from this like we run
from uncertainty even when we
make it pretty in our poetry it's
not pretty we're not pretty
there's paper in my lungs.

cut it up breathe it in
listen like paper breaths
sound like violins
what an orchestra these paper cuts
become when you listen
when you hum
and the paper sits in your lungs.

you’re the only person i feel safe talking to and somehow even that scares me.

safety. terrifyingly illusory. i wish i could pick and choose my fears, decide for myself what was worth my anxiety, worth hours and hours of tears and self-lies. i don’t know how good i have to be to have made it, how far i have to go to feel at home in myself.

sometimes i think you might be
a crutch
but without you it's a bit
too much.

the dark eyed girl holding the needle is confused. why
would anyone want her eyelids tattooed?
i get it, i do--but it's barely a bruise, barely
a sign that they've ever been used--
and yeah, it's new--it's even strange
it's even enough to think me deranged
but i'm almost done, almost out of pain
almost completed the list of flaws under
my name.
my name
my name my name
my flaws make a laundry list worthy of fame
and they all knock about behind walls behind name
and i can't get them out without playing the game
so i tattoo my flaws on my skin on my pain
desperate for saving of name and of fame
stretched, wretched, falling, lame
too many rhymes and i'll ruin the game
too many words and they're all the same,
too many people are calling my name,
and i
and i
and i
and i
drooping in places, veils on my eyes
is this a disguise? am i beyond lies?
with truths on my neck and my nape and my thighs?
look at the skies.

silence is riddled with death and with flies
look at her eyes.

when roses sip poisonous drinks
do they poison our minds?

do poisonous drinks tattoo their mistakes
on their eyes?

small protests,
a child's fist
in the air,
a comma
out of, place
a quiet and
simple
rebellion--
easy to
trace,

do these refusals fall into the void?
                                                                ­                               (does it mind?)

i can't write these things to you like i used to. you are ... less desperate than you used to be and i am
increasingly inconsistent and brimming
with the desperation i used to see
in you and
i love that, i swear to god i love to see you happy
content, at peace, at least, but
i think you were a crutch
or something
too much
but now that it's gone it's not enough.
all of this
to say
i miss you
and i miss you missing me.

sleeping on the sun
and dreaming about raindrops

i look at all of these perilously perfect poems and i want to SCREAM
life, your life, mine is not a dream this is not a picturesque reality
please---can we try for a bit of authenticity? c'mon i mean
we all love roses and the sunset gleam but your life isn't
an oil painting (or a tv screen) so can somebody sit down
and write a few lines about the dull gray sky or how her eyes
looked less like a forest and more like a swamp (with flies)?

sitting and wondering and laying flat
on a tile floor so cold
it feels wet
and wondering whether you stare at the ceiling
wondering too, wondering whether
i am staring.
or thinking of you.

toss your lackluster realities,
and the river will find you—
lost, wet and windswept
like autumn leaves
after rain,
like butterfly wings in
chlorine
like a hundred gossamer strings
on the sea.

do words float beneath your fingers like they for me, do you
hover above them, in awe of the rawness of freedom,

do you see freedom when you look at me?

do feelings and butterflies mix, rewind, do you feel
color-blind looking at anxiety and butterfly wings?

don't look at me--
between the fluttering in my lungs and my mind
there are ten thousand colors you couldn't see
if you looked at me.

i have never been
scared
of the dark before but
this dark is different
this dark is the dark
of a man, the dark of
fallen footsteps
groping hands
as i lay
in the dark
breathing words that stay
trapped between what i fear
and what i want to say

do you feel darkness like a man? is darkness
a groping hand?

crack it. my Finger stiff of cold. she doesn't care but i do, typing pop pop on keys too soft to snap. I'm full of **** and **** faced of me, praying for A New Thing to come along, any new thing works for me. hm. Wild Thoughts and yikes a little too much Love From Me. affectionate failure is still Bad when I am pretty.

bad things come here when i Say More Words than for me. Hold trinkets of apathy. Drop me.

roundy boundy two piercings in skin
blood's constipated and
metal tastes like it
already so
hey why can't i find where that went in?
i don't find where i am
i don't hide myself or anything but i think
myself hides when i need her. i stick knives into
tower walls to keep myself
in conversations
everyone tells me that i shouldn't have to
work so hard in conversations and
i don't i don't i
want to bleed
i like the way pain pierces itself over
and over and
over.
pain pills collect in dust and seasons
waver over the dried blood on my
ear lobes.

I AM SO TIRED OF BEING TERRIFIED

and maybe i'm stupid or dumb but i never craved ******* love i just wanted someone to fall back on.

romance is lovely but butterflies are overrated.
i just want to laugh and feel at home.

my hands dont shake like they used to
and i am hesitantly
content

i scrape by with poems and songs and each of them says "there is purpose, there is love," and I hoard them as my senses ring and touch turns intangible and the music sings "you are something, God
i don't know what,
but you're something."

hm. somehow i missed you,
anxiety. i feel
more myself, this is
familiarity in a
nutshell, i know the
buzz
in my chest cavity
better than i know
myself,
it seems.
i guess i'm not the epitome
of health, these days
late nights
droughts and self-doubt all
seem to take out
the part of me that used
to dream. or think. or
do anything at all
really.
i guess that's okay,
i guess
between loneliness
and fear there's
an alleyway, home,
a place you don't go
until you're there,
realizing more
and more
how easy it is to stay
and how hard it is to care.

there is nothing to fear
           the words in my head,
                      the way my fingers shake, the darkness
        of a night without stars, the
 loneliness of a night

                                               without

                                                               ­           you.

how strange, how unfathomably empty and grand
is life. death.

people are not small, they are terrifically gigantic, brilliant---
and when they die
they create black holes,
                                               like stars

i suppose sometimes you just have to start writing. even if the words fall in fragments, leaving letters and half-thoughts strewn across the page, the important part is that you write.
right?
when writing about themselves, many writers deem it appropriate to start from the beginning--with “the beginning” meaning many different things. for me, i don’t know when it really started, but i do know when it began to end.

my hands are trembling with infuriating intensity and she just stands there, eyes shining and hands fumbling like they always do. looking at me like she always does—like i am someone, or worth something, but she’s always been wrong.

“i shake when i talk to you,” i say, my gaze fixated on the off-white kitchen tiles in front of his feet, my feet planted on those same tiles, my hands winding around each other and my nails digging in my palms. i see him stepping closer, closing the distance in 3, 2, 1---

“i shake when i’m not talking to you,” he whispers.

he kisses me. we don't shake.

nick grabs my waist and pulls me closer to him, and there’s a light in his eyes i haven’t seen before, a manic spark brighter than the neon spotlights above. bodies and sounds rage around us, the temperature and beat rising as one, my own heartbeat echoing in my head. i’m not a dancer and if it weren’t for his hands in mine i’m sure i would have been lost, tossed and trapped in the gyrating mass of limbs and smoke and screaming.

but he isn’t lost, the lights blinking rapidly and reflected in his smile, he’s smiling, and i can’t hear him but he’s laughing too.

magnetic.

“i have wanted many terrible, beautiful things,” he says. “the purest thing my hands have touched by far,” he tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “is you.”