I’m so in love with you
            but I feel like I’ve ruined it
and my fragile filthy mind
         replays my shortcomings
                       my embarrassments
                       my failure
                       my faults
                       my worthlessness
your tears.

Drained by my own hand,
pulled from your eyes
                                         by my ability to destroy

everything good            and
everything I want in this life

My god I really ****** up
How can I not have seen
His poison sinks into my lips as I lay
writing
I warned him of my vacant lies,
My tasteless, cryptic scars
I should've help my passions near
And loved him from afar

Now all I see through open eyes
Unfocused in the dark
Is his crooked smile I wish he knew
Reflected my crooked heart.

i can try to blame lovers,
    but it's not all their fault
  i'm still learning the difference
between white sugar
                                      and salt

investment in yourself is highly encouraged
never likely
and usually exciting

but what they don't tell you
that's quite the most frightening
is sometimes they spit it back
and you lose all,

just like me.

call me,

                               i still love you

sense is nonsensical
the way i stretch my fabric legs across concrete
                                         man made
synthetic                and                        septic

the trees blow in the breeze
                      beyond me
there's no pattern to the sway
though it makes sense
                                               in a way

sense is nonsensical
and i wish i could release the weight of my brain
drift into the wind with the tree's sway
if i'm lucky,

                         forget my own name

the list of names grows longer in honor
of every night awake
They say it won't matter but everything shatters
and I'm fine to put it away.

You can say it any way,
but I'm playing games
still torn each time they walk
away.

I've been silent on paper
I've been loud in my head
the voices that chatter against my skull
              Reverberations of all my shortcomings, failures,
My narratives of unworthiness

                                  I am my own detriment
                                           my own destruction

I cling to pain and welcome heartache like an old friend

                                     I was born with a broken heart
fragile and shattered
                                  carefully pieces together
                                 bursting at the seams

crushed by the hands i chose to hold it.

I’m angry with the people who diseased my brain
I’m angry with myself for being weaker than the pain

I can talk about it

Easy

How my body slips between the sheets
The things I do while on my knees

It’s beautiful

I’m proud of the pleasure of my skin
Always looking for ways to win
The attention of what makes me feel good

I can talk about it

But does holding that pleasure
And lustrous needs
Out of the hands of hungry thieves
Deplete my sexuality?

I don’t think so.
I’m no lesser of promiscuous
Because I pick and choose of us
Those I share myself with

you confirmed all of my horrors
when you said you can't touch me sober

In the false spring, there was light

                                                               Epiphany

                               Eureka in technicolor

But blinders above centrifugal spokes
                     scattered through prisms
           a deflection of armor
And
                  
                                   The rain came.

                                                                                       Light remained.

But what previously perceived
                       as vibrancy
was shattered in repeat streams
                       of disbelief
over every evil stitch seamed
                       in the fabric of my clothes
                                                                     And Rose-

Colored glasses gave way
                                                without rest
                external tempest
                                                with self-inflicted misery
I could not leave.

                                                                    And now I see
that the foyer of this love
                                               was not chromatic
                                               was not prismatic
                    though gaudy, flashy this all-encompassing
Prison of color
                                  was nothing but
           mediated, alternating, monopolizing
                                  preoccupying
                                                                    Shades of Blue.

                And then there was you.

The false spring melted down
                    to fragments in cracked glass
Wiped my blood from broken mirrors
                    no longer asinine and crass
Still mentally impounded
                                                 in emblems au courrant
Took a sip from poisoned drips
                                                                   just one more scar to flaunt

But every day in smaller strides
                                 the forage cleared and scorched
The winter came with sleet and
                           Rain
                                                             another touch to tortured

And as the ice begins to melt
                       and false spring lays to rest
With you there are no problems except
                                                                         where to be happiest

If my body is a temple
I built it for you
Let you dwell in every room
And corner cribs of cobwebs
Because with sideways glances I’d swoon

I am all for you

I let you set chests and nests and hang pictures of us from the wood of my ribs
Snapping in northbound hotels
Bottles and swells of love
In upcoming absence
Never a doubt

I slipped and I fell and I didn’t do well for you
I know
I know

But before you gave me air to try
To prove that you and I were something good
No temporary high
You tore the shots from the splintering cage
You had recently laid
With me between

Now my bed is as empty as the halls of my body
This temple is nothing but rubble and sully
You said you would love me
You said you would stay
I patiently rode all the swells of your waves

And I’m sorry

I’m sorry the briars that join at my chest
Weren’t polished or silver
Or quite good enough

for you

I’m sorry you couldn’t make a home in me
I’ll curl to your voice and plead you won’t leave

Forever

If you weren’t us
You’d laugh at us

I wish I could believe it as I careful pried vessels from saved beating security
Reached into my chest
And gave you the very best
Of me

I wish I’d been enough

I wish you would stay

My hollowed out beatless heart
Reeks of decay

Of the chance I took on you
So sure
I was sure
I was sure
I am sure

You’ll come back to me

But I’ve always been good at lying to myself
False hope and future blows seem to
Silence the swells
As my life and my love drains in lines down my face

I never thought loving you meant you would break

Me

I’ll still think of Little girls lying in daffodils
Every lit candle, and egg white whiskey sours
And warmth overcoming
The sleek of your skin
I’ll still feel you running
From The weight of my sins

And I’ll be here in patience and kindness and wait
Even though when You ended me I couldn’t take
It

Please stay

But you’ll leave they all leave I’d said nothing to pay
The price of my toll causes none to delay
I’m sorry my head held shadows in corners
And doubted yourself
When facing my currents

I’d reach out and say I’d be better to you
I’d try with my might, all your mountains, to move

It’s you from the wreckage
The scars
And the war

It’s you who’s stayed standing at the stage of my fronts

I’ve seen you forever like none before
And that’s why, though I cried,
Please still know that our door


Is still open



                                 if you change your mind

cold sweats in the winter
     are a different breed of agony
i shiver in my heat
         and damp sheets
staring up at the ceiling fan
        begging its blades to drip down the wall
     and surround me
confined to the safe isolation of my room

no more bodies warm my sheets
i'm tired of cycling through empty feelings
           pulling love with my teeth

i'm tired
                                   i'm tired
                 i'm tired

there must be more than this uncertainty

so holding on to loose-knit limbs held only by the thought
That maybe one day your own gates

will not be iron wrought

I feel like property you check in
Every now and then

To make sure that my weeds are clear

        so someone can move in

I could blame it on many things
Like the sounds I make in the morning
The people I’ve faithlessly broken
Or that I’m impossibly weak

I could blame it on the inadequacy or
How much that I drink

Anything other than the truth in these seams
Anything other than the fact that
I’m sure about you

And you’re not sure

About me.

i got just what was coming
and you got just what you wanted

talk is cheap - that's why we bought it.

I’m an acquired taste
Like coffee or IPAs

I thought you said we are a team,

       I’m for you, and you’re for me


but teams are made of players,

                          so I guess I should’ve seen.

i didn't look both ways before turning onto the street today
and a car almost clipped my bike
i slammed on the brakes
and dragged my shoes against the asphalt

a narrow miss
that previously would have flirted too closely
with desires lingering just below the surface
of flying too close to the sun

and the drop, the impact, the trigger, the pressure
craved by the skeletons in my cortex
rather than the anticipated quiet release
brought an increase          in my heart rate

fleeting fear commandeered my lust for the abyss
and i surprised myself, for daring
to live, the thought echoing across my skull

as sporadically panned as my stereo fields

the appeal to take another breath, for once,
has been much more scary, but

isn't all of this just            

                                               tem-
                  
                            -po-                              

                                                                                   -rar-
                                                  -y

dull, white lights
and softer smiles
a gentle touch
in hindsight files

replay and replay
in flickering lights
I can't reach out
but I know you fight

the same desires.

tension present and always grows
face to face
where nobody knows

but me and you.

I’m tired of people meeting me

And falling in love with somebody


Who doesn’t exist

I wish you knew

How it felt to meet your lips
Pillows of bliss putting my soul to bed

And I wish you could feel

The tracing edge of your fingertips
Drifting currents through my skin
To the shivered ends of my hips

and I wish you could hear

In the silence between pleas
For pain
The craving stifled stream of intimacy
Against the way I never wanted to be touched again


I never wanted to need



And I wish you
As you

Pulled from the storms of clouded vision
And black edged screams
could feel
The difference as I lift
To delicacy
Over legions of lesions
I claim I need

they ask me what my pain feels like,
i say not everything feels like something else

I've already thought of the worst things I could do to you
cyclically
incessantly

a game of control and nothing more

yet it hadn't crossed me to consider
the worst things you could do to me

until i was met unmoving with your heat
and I retreated

                 how uncharacteristic.

                                              ­                         how exciting.

Am I putting myself first?

       Not enough?                      Too much?
i feel im going to burst .....

It took me long to learn to be selfish
                                and now those lessons

                know no bounds and in certain times
                 I’m found

Being petulant
  
                                                  And aggressive


         with my tongue.


I hate the feeling
         Fighting internal bleeding
                       of my very soul
        
      the one I finally told
                                               to stand up.

As she reveals herself from the pit of neglect
              she rears an ugly head

         is this something I can regret?

Let it go and let her out
                Learn to grow               but I find out

a horror in my capabilities


             Is this unlearning?
        
                                   or is this
                                                          Me­?

somebody cares about my body
                                            and the way i spend it
                                                                                                and

                           i won't tell them how much i cried
when they told me that.

i keep my room tidy, so they'll think of me kindly
when they come for my things.