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4am
Laina Jul 2018
4am
I always find myself in moments
balanced poetically between control and chaos
With just one sip tipping me over
until I’m more than tipsy
Falling, but the string is snapping
I cant bounce back
(Stumbling out the door
I need to get away
He can’t see me like this)
And as I hit the floor
A bone-crushing silence
And then my own laughter
Uncontrollable
as I’m writhing there
with my broken stilettos
and black mascara running down
my flushed face, pressed into the pavement.
Yet I still can’t stop laughing,
suddenly finding the trivialities of my own existence so ******* funny.
My sanity is outweighed by the bottles
like rocks on the scale
Rising up in patient stillness
Until I fall, and fail.
He wouldn’t want to catch me
So I catch my breath and stand,
My ripped clothes now revealing dried, caked-on blood
(It matches the lipstick stain, still on my glass)
wounds of doubt and delirious self-indulgence.
Now everyone sees it,
knows my self-inflicted secret,
that I wanted myself to fall-
I’ve grown bored of this balancing act.
I pull my coat a little tighter
So he won’t notice that I ripped myself open
With the drinks he bought me,
and walk back into the bar,
because if I went to sleep now
the loneliness would crush me.
and worst of all,
I might miss the way his voice sparkles
At 4 am.
Laina May 2018
I am the universe.

I’ve died a handful of times
Yet somehow resurrect each morning
Every nightly loss of consciousness
A sour taste of what awaits.


From where I have come
I will inevitably return
A change of state
Galvanized by time.

Deconstructing, dissipating
Reshuffling, rearranging
From infinity to solid and then back
To infinity once more.

The universe is me.

I am abstract, not concrete
A hologram self
A bundle of dying and newborn cells
Held together by the stars.

Not planetary, but nebulous
A dark matter beyond the grasp of my
Quarter century old mind
Materialized from 140 million centuries past
And an eternity to come.

I am the universe.
The universe is me.
There is no death in forever.
Laina May 2018
We danced t o g e t h e r but alone
Hollow, dried up love
Without heartbeat keeping rhythm
Instruments left unplugged.

The crowd buzzed around us
Through us
A twirling blur you’d miss if you blinked
Faint echoes of substance.

We danced with fear of culmination
Eternally shuffling feet
Preferring exhaustion over truth
As our minds floated far away.

The world spun around us
Oblivious to us
Stubborn ceaselessness
A corpse love refusing to rest.

We danced t o g e t h e r but alone
Slowly
Drift
ing
aw
a
y









When I accepted that
Together is lonely,
I released his hand.

The crowd buzzed around us
And he dissolved into it

Broken from this silent reverie
I heard the strumming of a guitar.
And danced alone, but together.
Laina May 2018
The room sleeps
As I lay awake
And as the sun rises
I want to reach out the window,
shove it back down and
Give myself a few more hours
With the calm rise and fall of your chest.

I don’t exist outside of here,
Only between the posts of your bed.
Fabrication
Needing constant validation
From your touch.
And if the morning never comes,
You’ll stay here
And I can pretend to be
What you need.

If time runs
Then I should be able to dam it up
Like a river
Stop it from flowing
Freeze it in place.

But time is greedy.
The moon is too weak
To stick around.

When light fills the room
And wakes it from delirium
The dreamer stirs
And I disappear.
Am I just a dream?

When I’m gone there is nothing.
Just time.

One word from your lips
And my body reanimates
Dances, breathes
then lies still again.
Finally awake.
But alive? Real?
The room only knows.
Laina May 2018
my life is greyscale
yours technicolor.
I pretend to like my movies black and white.


you look at me and see mountains
but under these clothes are holes

you confuse the beams for starlight

there is no starlight
not even moonlight
to complement your sunlight

just reflections of vacant spaces.

I turn the lights off so you don’t notice
that I am more nothing than something
more empty than whole.

I fake it so you stop
before you have enough time to realize
that I am just a ghost.

the breath of life is gone
wonder, awe, all of god’s little blessings
bled out of the holes.

you can try to fix me
but I evanesce faster than you
can sew me up.

I have nothing to offer you
that can be seen, felt, heard.
Touched maybe
but my soul recoils from your outstretched hand.

touch me fast
before I feel
touch me hard
before I fade away.
Laina Nov 2018
I remember your voice.
Its all I can think about, playing constantly like a record on repeat.
A broken record, with shards of past longing and foolishness
Cutting into my soul each time I listen
Each **** a fresh reminder of your absence
Scar tissue layered upon rectified hopes
A mixtape of im sorry’s and I love you’s
That I desperately long to crush
Underneath the weight of your promise
And my heavy, drunken eyes.
Every night I futilely scramble to play a new song,
Laden with silky melodies to help me drift to sleep
But instead your laugh burns in the depth of my throat
(or is that the alcohol?)
which I clutch in an attempt to strangle out
the last of your whispers
and turn it off.
Laina May 2018
desperately, i try to claw through my chest
with dull, filed-down nails in an attempt
to break apart these stitches in time
that are holding me together, barely,
with a single thread;
i laugh as if mocking my own futile battle against my past
with knowledge of what my present stacks
in tightly wrapped boxes hidden under my own bed,
guarded by a monster
with four hands and four legs and four arms and two hearts,
because i left myself entwined in him that night
and never bothered to ask for mine back.

so i write this letter to him knowing
it will go unread because his eyes have grown
accustomed to the darkness under there
and the only light i’ve ever seen came from his smile
and he hasn't smiled at me in 3 weeks, 2 days, and 1 minute
but who's counting up,
i only count down until this year ends
and i can put up a new calendar with new dates
that wont be ruined by his
discontented restlessness and absent mind.
i can fill it with plans and hope,
my life squeezed into inch-wide boxes.

but nothing that i do will make the slightest difference,
like subtracting my 20 years from infinity and
dividing my pain into months and days and seconds,
dividing until i press it into a slide and it is
invisible even under a microscope,
because it doesn’t matter
and he doesn’t matter
and i don’t matter
and nothing matters
and nothing ever will. not here,
in this vortex of voided passion and wasted time.

i have no more love to give, he has it all.
nor can i take any-
i lack the space.
my muscles are filled with agony,
my lungs with salt water,
my bones with frailty
and my tongue with the bitter sting of goodbye.

if i were gone no one would even notice.
maybe he would cry
but later he would forget. in milliseconds
i would be reduced from infinite heartache to nothing
and then maybe i could forget like everyone else,
my own well-deserved plunge into happiness.
Laina Aug 2018
after swearing you would never hurt her
you discarded her along with all the other pretty hopeless things
not broken (NEVER broken)
but anachronistic, paradoxical, incongruous
a past that won’t leave the present.

glimmering tears falling in the dark
unseen, muffled, tracing the fossils of his breath on her cheek.

a sequin dress on the living room floor
with a naked moon child sticking a head out the window
still suffocating.

eyeliner wings searching for halos
but turning up empty
knowing angels don’t exist in her world-
laughing at the thought.

when you, a ghost, moved towards the light
(even though you see a new light every day-
never her, always something, still not enough)
you left her in the blackness of your discarded dreams
like a tool you had no more use for.

ghost stories are meant to scare little girls into sleeping with guns and walking with keys interlaced between fumbling fingers
and as he fades into that ghost from her story
she will try to sleep.

disbelief in ghosts
does not stop them from haunting your dreams
nor stop you from becoming one yourself.

she’s stuck in a timeline that moved on without her
watching like a ghost as life around her naively continues (how? do they still believe?)
hand over mouth to prevent escaped screams
phone in pocket to prevent escaped words

he must not know.
admitting she is still here
is admitting she is pretty hopeless
on her own.
Laina May 2018
My smile is a dead language.
It used to mean many things.
It was interpreted, adored.
It isn’t real anymore
A vestige of a time long passed.
Now it just represents death
A shadow of the happiness
I used to know.

I used to love fireworks.
I could sit out on the beach
On the fourth of july
And watch them for hours
The brilliant flashes of color
And seconds after, the crackling and booming.

That’s love, my dear.
Pretty one minute,
Seemingly endless and infinite
But destined for destruction.
A flash and then,
Before you even hear it explode,
the colors fade away.
if you even blink one moment-
gone.
Then the boom
Lagging seconds behind
The realization that it is over.
Nothing will ever sparkle that brilliantly again.

What you’re watching are elements lit on fire
Blasted through the air in a blaze of glory
Cascading back to earth burnt up and used.

I used to be alive
blissful, free.
But once reduced to ash
I cannot be lit up again.


The language of my smile
Ceased being spoken
When he stopped listening.
Laina Jul 2018
I put the flowers you sent me
On my desk
They clung to life on
A glass of water
And the light that passed
Through the slits of my blinds.

They were quite lovely
You know.
Vibrant, resilient
Arching towards any hope of sun
That reached my 17th story apartment.

They’re dead now
Starting to brown, shrivel up.
Fitting.
I can’t seem to throw them away.
Laina May 2018
I thought of you and my ear started to ring.
Is that my body casting you out?
Discrete madness
Desire building up
With nowhere else to go
but in a surge out of my head?

Maybe it’s an echo of my ringing phone
Good-morning calls
Bored-driving calls
Lonely-night calls
Random-2pm-thinking-of-you calls
i-just-want-to-hear-you-talk calls
A disembodied voice carried through wire
Whispers separated by highways
Longing to be breathed into the other’s neck
A love changing by the moon.

Does it mean you are thinking of me?
I heard that from somewhere.
Or is it talking about me?
Maybe it’s both
I know you moan my name
A smoke raised with the fume of sighs
Is yours ringing too?


This is a death-mark’d love at first touch
The fates cackling at our persistence
Our hands reaching pathetically
Out of grasp.

We are so afraid to be alone
So ******* stubborn
That we lack foresight
Sensing the inevitable
But denying, ignoring,
Sitting still as the earth shakes
Apathetic to the world devouring us alive
Attempting to defy the stars.

These violent delights have violent ends.
Laina Jul 2018
I tied a rope around my feet
an anchor on the other end
Tossed it overboard
And plunged behind it
into the cold Atlantic water.

Did you know that
Blue is the only color
That makes it to the vast depths
Of the oceans?

No sunny yellow days
Green fields
Pink sunsets
Red lips.

No orange.
No purple.
No gray.
Just blue.

God, why did your eyes have to be blue.
Laina Dec 2018
Alone and empty
I moved without the moon
Attempting to keep my own rhythm
Stubbornly holding onto control.

You crept up like the tide
Always moving in and out
Too slowly to notice
Until it swept me away.

Your water nourished me
When I was accustomed to drought
Acclimated to the constant thirst
that I forgot I even had.

I dove right into the waves
Toes numb, eyes focused at the horizon
Not knowing what to expect,
Accepting your water in my soul.

Submerging myself,
My body compelled me to come up for air
Take a breath
But my gilled heart was secure down there
For the first time.

Autumn implies decay
Vibrant colors turned to brown
No green in sight
Remembering the lively spring.

But look closely as
the leaves drop from their source of life
And find the dirt from which they were born.
There is no death here.

Just as the water moves by some greater force,
As the leaves fall
to birth new life,
So do I yield to the cycle.

In allowing myself to be moved,
in forfeiting control,
In falling,
I find my peace in you

— The End —