I sat under the stars
And begged for you last night.
But you were still gone
When I woke up this morning.
How am I supposed to know
If I should stay,
When to let go?

Tuesday mornings on the front porch,
Sipping dark coffee and watching the world  pass us by.
The sky will bleed a thousand different colors
But you will still be the sun.

She is electric, frenetic energy
Dancing on broken glass,
She’s the current racing through oceans.
She’s about to overload your circuits,
And tomorrow you’ll thank her for it,
Begging on your knees for just
One more taste.

The mirror is not my friend.
I asked it once, "who is the fairest of them all?"
And my own mouth answered,  "certainly not you."
I heard it echo a thousand times in a
Thousand different voices, all of them telling me
I’d never be good enough.
For myself, for anyone.
I let my fist find the reflection of my mouth
And I did not flinch as my blood fell onto the shards.

I told you
Once
I told you
A million
Times

I'm fine
(my chest is caving in)
I'm okay
(I can't breathe I can't think I can't)

I told you with clenched fists
And wild eyes
I'll be alright I'll be fine
It's all just in my mind.

I learned the true meaning of disappointment
The day I stopped calling you “daddy.”
It was the same day I realized you were not
Responsible for hanging the moon, and you
Certainly hadn’t done it for me. I realized
That the bottles in the paper bags would
Always come before me. I learned that you loved me
But that love lived in a box in the attic,
Dusty and forgotten. I learned that I’d never know
What it was like to live on my father’s shoulders,
If only for a moment. I’d never know what it was
Like to want to escape the overprotective father
Or what it’d be like to apologize to a boy for
The way my father sized him up. I’d never be chastised
For the length of my skirt or how much makeup I was wearing.
I learned that sometimes the ones that are supposed
To protect you from the pain of the world
Are the ones that hurt you the most.
I never learned what it was like to have a father.
Or at least, one that didn’t destroy you.

I carved myself a hollow in your chest
Called it home.
It’s something else to be encased
By your bones, to listen to the
Absolute lullaby of your heartbeat.
Your fingers crawled into my ribs
Tattooing your fingerprints into
My bones and I am yours, entirely
Utterly yours.

I don’t want to be a delicate ******* flower
I want to be made of stone
I want to be a formidable tower
I want to be a battering ram
I don’t want to watch the world’s eyes pass over me
Like they do every ******* day
I don’t want to be the paper-hearted girl anymore
Because my heart always ends up torn and shredded
And balled up in some trash bin because
Somebody ****** up and decided to start over
But the funny thing is, you don’t get a new heart
Once it’s been broken. You left me with no other
Option but to fish my crumpled paper heart out of the
Trash, to smooth out and to erase the marks you left
But you can still see the wrinkles and the imprints
Of what was written. There’s no fresh heart for me.
There’s no replacing the petals that were lost to the
“He loves me, he loves me not” game. I may be
Made of stone, but I am just a pebble thrown
Around by the smallest body of water.
I may be a tower, but I’m a lego tower
And just the fist of a child could destroy me.
And ******* my paper heart.
Did you have to write your name in pen?

I used to know how to be alone.
Before you, I knew how to sit quietly
I knew how to handle the dark on my own
I knew how to be alone.
In the aftermath of falling in love with you,
The night holds an emptiness when you’re
Not here with me. My bed is no longer a
Safe place because there is a two foot
Void you’re supposed to occupy.
Even my skin doesn’t know how to be
Without you, so accustomed it became
To your lips and your fingertips
And the feel of you wrapped around me.
You ruined my solitude. With your voice
And your heart and your love,
You ruined my alone.

There are a million reasons why, why not.
You could write novels about
Every single one of them.
Paint canvases, vandalize empty walls.
And it’d be a shame to waste that paint,
Waste the words inside you, but don’t
Take too long. Or if you do,
If you’re going to run fools’ errands,
If you’re going to run towards what has already been,
Make sure your shoelaces are tied tight.
Don’t trip over your excuses,
Because maybe, just maybe, running in
The wrong direction for so long will find
You running towards something right
And maybe when you get there you’ll realize
How silly you were and how grateful you
Are for it because your bones don’t
Scrape your skin the way they used to
And the dissonant melody of your blood
Suddenly sounds more like a pleasant thrum in your chest.
When you get there, untie your shoes,
Take them off. Let yourself become one with the ground
You stand on. Close your eyes, think of home,
How home never smelled this good, how home
Never kept your toes this warm. Home is so far away
And it’s okay to be scared, but keep going.
Living in the realm of your fear will keep you
Ten feet from where you’ve always been
And what beautiful things will you find there?
The same roses that bloomed last spring and wilted
Last fall, the same trees that become skeletons
Against the empty white of wintertime.
Keep going because your last dress will be
A body bag and it’d be a shame to find yourself
In the same dress your mother wanted you to wear
To church every Sunday instead of that dress
You bought against your (her) better judgment
Because it was too short or too expensive
But you feel like a goddess every time you wear it
And it seems only fitting your exit from this
Life as a wild child is that of a goddess.

I loved you
Once.

I loved you the way
Desperation loves
Quick hearts
And shallow breaths.

I loved you irresponsibly
And without limit.

It took me a long time to accept
You did not love me,
You never did,
You never would.

You didn’t love me in any kind of way
Except the way that attention loves
Its own reflection.

For me, you were a world I desperately
Longed for.
For you, I was an audience and all you
Longed for was applause.

It took me a long time to rebuild
The walls that you unabashedly destroyed.
I was a village you thoughtlessly set fire to.
And had you wiped me off the map,
You wouldn’t have spared a thought for me.

But here I am, rebuilt, whole,
And my foundations are so much stronger.
So for that, I thank you.
I thank you for recklessly destroying me
And showing me what love is and what
Love should never be.

My mother tells me I'm not broken.
She tells me I'm whole and perfect
And that she loves me.
I stopped arguing a long time ago
Because there's no way to tell her
How the pieces of broken glass inside of me
Collide sometimes, like storm-stirred
Oceans and barges, how it sinks ships
And shreds lips. There's no way to tell her
How my thoughts slide against each other
The way a serrated knife slides so easily
Against the skin. I can't tell her how my
Hands shake when I think of all the ones
That left me so easily. I can't tell her how
The coldness settles in my bones when
I miss them, no matter how hard I try
to forget them. I can't tell her about the headaches,
The ones that radiate through my jaw
Because I clenched my teeth all day to
Hold in the screams of frustration.
The headache from all the screaming
I do in my head because I don't know
How to breathe, how to speak, how to
Describe all the ways I feel broken.
How I look in the mirror and I see
The outlines of a thousand piece puzzle
Drawn all over my body and the pieces
That are missing, the pieces that they took
When they left me without looking back.
The bite in my belly when they say
"I'll call you." Half because I know they won't,
Half because I desperately hope they will.
My mother doesn't see the puzzles,
The broken glass, the bleeding lips when
She looks at me - she's so desperate to believe
That all the time she spent trying to put me together,
To make sure I was a real girl, a perfect picture,
Was worth the effort. And I'm so sorry, mommy.
I'm sorry it wasn't.

When I met you
Roses grew out of the tangled bones of my rib cage
Grew down the lengths of my body like ivy
Thorns holding on tight to skin, fed by blood.
It’s been awhile
And lonely, lovesick girls have plucked all my petals
Does he love me? Does he love me not?
A little girl in particular with dark eyes and a quiet soul
Looked at me with guilt
As she tore off my final petal
And I was nothing but vine.
She whispered, he loves me.
She smiled so bright and big, her lips cracked til they bled.
I remembered that smile, remembered the blood
Dripping down my chin, just as it dripped from my fingertips now.
I told her, baby girl,
It doesn’t matter how much he loves you
If he doesn’t bother to water the roses he left in your ribs.

1.
A boy I used to know
Found me one day, hidden in
The quietest clearing in a vacant park.
He looked me up and down
As if to say
You are not someone I ever knew.
He pulled me to my feet
Brushed the concrete off my shoulders
And he asked me
“What happened to you?
What happened to that girl I once knew?
The girl who accepted nothing less than
Exactly what she wanted
And gave absolutely everything she had?
When did the girl that ignored everybody
Become the girl everybody ignored?”
I didn’t have the answers then.
I still don’t.
2.
He gave me a broken shard of mirror
And the girl in it looked
More like a ghost than a person.
She was so pale,
Eyes sunken and bruised,
Her lips thin and torn to pieces.
The boy tucked the mirror into one pocket
A picture into the other, said,
“You call me when the girl in that picture
Comes back to life.
She was life and soul and love
Personified. That girl was magic.”
3.
I cut myself on that shard of mirror
And it seems I bled for days.
I ruined that picture,
The one of the girl that was
Life and soul and love personified.
4.
I never saw him again, he never came looking.
I don’t know what I’d say anyway.
I’m sorry, old friend,
But that girl died a long time ago.
Where were you? Why didn’t you care enough
To save her?
Hasn’t anyone told you magic isn’t real?
Hasn’t anyone ever told you
Life and love and soul will die?
They die when there is nothing left to feed the fire.
5.
I wrote him a letter.
I wrote him a hundred letters.
I wrote him a letter
About the boy I loved once.
He reminded me a little of you¸ I wrote.
He loved me the way you love a photograph
He touched all the beautiful places
Appreciated the glow and the shine
Kept me on his bedside table to look at
When the nights got lonely.
The funny thing about photographs though,
Is the colors and the beauty and the shine fade.
You forget what happened after the flash snapped
You forget the stories and the honesty and the life.
He lost the picture, I guess.
Beneath exquisite and profound novels. Found
New pictures.
6.
Today’s letter:
I smashed a vase against the wall.
I smashed my mother’s favorite mug against the pavement.
I broke a mirror with my fist
I ripped up every letter anyone’s ever sent me.
Hit the walls with hammers.
Broke a window.
Broke my arm.
Where were you when I needed you?
I need you.
He hasn’t answered any of my letters.
I don’t think he will.
7.
A boy I once knew
Reminded me that there was once a girl
Where my ghost is.
And you know what? My ghost got hungry,
Because suddenly she remembered how
Wearing a body was supposed to feel.
My ghost got angry
I got angry
I don’t know how to find her again,
The girl I used to be.
I think maybe she’s dead, buried in the backyard under
All my childhood friends and the rose bush
My mother loves so much.
8.
He wrote me a letter.
Not so much a letter, but a punch to the chest,
A single sentence written on the back of a California postcard:
Remember the phoenix,
Make use of your ashes.







(nine:
I found my wings, buried under coffee grounds
And orange peels on the side of the interstate.
Brushed the ash off; they still fit.
I met a boy there too
His wings were ***** and beautiful.
He kissed my scars,
Shook hands with my ghost.
I haven’t seen her since.)

I never ask for much
And it hurts because you don’t notice
The suffering in my silence.
It hurts in my bones and aches in my blood.
You can’t ease my pain anymore,
I don’t think you know how.
I think maybe you never did.
Maybe because I’ve never told you how much
I need your words
     I need your truth
          I need your kiss
               I need your love
                     I need you.

But you are so very far away
And I’m sinking so fast
And I’m sorry I never told you before.
I’m sorry I never asked for much.

Check your pockets –
No, not those.
Not now.

Someday,
When you’re cold
Or nervous, or bored
And your fingers find their familiar way
Into the pockets of your jeans or your jacket,
You’ll find I’ve left something for you
Little notes I wrote
Over the years
Thousands of them

Every time I thought of you.

Let the girl I once was see a photograph
Of the girl I have become.
Tell her what led to the darkened eyes
Shredded lips, ****** nails.
But tell her the good things too
Tell her about every kiss and every
I love you, the gifts, the hope.
Show her the ugly, the awful, the beautiful.
All of it, every last moment.
And then ask her,
You want to do this to yourself?
You want to become this girl?
And she told me to tell you
It's easy to swear you won't regret
What you once wanted.
But she also said if
I knew then what I do now,
I don't know if I would have wanted it
In the first place.

1.
Turn off the bedroom lights,
Because it's easier to be brave in the dark.
But remember to breathe;
Night won't change who you've become.
2.
He'll tell you he loves you. Over and over again.
Breathe it, whisper it, carve it into your skin with bleeding fingertips.
Do you hear him?
He loves you the best he knows how.
It's still not enough.
3.
It takes time to erase the scars that have glued your soul to the concrete.
4.
When they push you to the ground
Rub the dirt into your wounds
Fill your pockets with stones
So that the next time they try
You can tell them I've already been to bottom
I've made it home.
You can't be hurt by something you've already learned to love.
5.
He'll tell you he loves you  and you'll turn off the lights
You'll pretend the scars don't exist, that you are air and he is fire
And that neither of you have a home
Dirt, stone, or otherwise.
He'll tell you he loves you, and you'll let his breath rebuild your synapses
You'll let his skin rebuild your nervous system.
You'll love him back.

6.
You don't want to be alone tonight
But there you sit, tracing the veins of your hands, your wrists, your thighs.
You're learning to be alone, you're learning to love yourself again.
Find home, turn the lights on
You can make peace now with who you've become.

Quiet now, they whisper.
Their fingers are like paintbrushes on my skin
Leaving deep red welts instead of paint smears.
Careful now, they hiss,
Their fingers to my lips and it burns and burns.
I cannot scream, they’ve shoved my sound deep
Into my chest, and it thrums there, boiling and burning
Thrashing like a caged animal.
Still, so still, looking into a black mirror
And the only thing I see is myself;
I can’t help but feel I’m drowning under water
But there is air in my lungs, however harsh it may be.
My reflection stares at me with the blankness of a porcelain doll.
Cold, quiet, smiling in a way that I am not
The body I am in does not smile,
But my reflection does.
She smiles wide and vicious, blinking in deceitful innocence.
And she moves out of the glass, the smoky tendrils
Of her fingertips
Wrap around my wrists, painting all the way down to the bone
And the rest of them silence my screams.

Once,
The universe tore us all in half
Tossed across continents and oceans,
Said, it is your challenge
  In life
  To find the rest of you.
  To make yourself whole again.
Some of us have taken this challenge boldly,
Some with a grain of salt,
Some not at all, wasting away in loneliness.
Truth be told, I do not know for certain
If you are the half of me so long ago
Stolen away out of fateful spite
But, baby, I’d bet my life on it
And if at the end of the night, I lose my life
I still had the privilege of losing it to you.

Could I crawl out of my skin for a little while?
I’d like to go for a swim in far away universes
Doze in the Garden of Eden
Maybe plant some roses on the moon
Watch a year or two, maybe three, float by without the
Fistful of blades, the bleeding lips
And someday I can return to my body unafraid
And the mess life makes of me will not bother me
So much as it will fascinate me
The small things will not create chaos
And when I feel that unforgiving, angry fist
I’ll think of Eden and those pools of stars,
I’ll look up and see my roses on the moon.

You are not just a name
Lurking on the tip of my tongue
The backbone of every thought,
But a state of mind.
You’re the lace that holds my ribs together
The ribbon binding me into shape

The blood that rushes beneath my skin
Remembers exactly where your fingers
Once touched
Your lips once lay
Pressing your love into my skin
As if I am your paper, your fingers are ink
Turning me into a letter only you and I could read

And I do, I read it over and over
Anxious for the next letter to be burned
This is my skin, for you,
A thousand different love letters.

Dear writers (and artists and songwriters and poets, etc),

Tell me,

When the thing that drives your heartbeat no longer belongs to you

What do you do with the things you made?

Because surely, most of your work is based on this particular muse

Because I see things laced with love and adoration

And I wonder

I wonder

When that adoration no longer exists in you

How could you possibly look at the words you wrote with tenderness

Or the masterpiece you painted in their image

Or the song you painstakingly pieced together note by note in honor of the way they kiss goodnight

And not want to destroy it?

This skin is an uncomfortable stranger
Rigid and unyielding
There is a little voice in my skull
It warns against the hearts
That try to beat along with mine,
Try to get
Near enough to feel my rigid skin
They will tear it, they will shred you
But
Why would anyone want you anyway?
That voice inside is a brutal *****.

There is my face staring me back
In the mirror
And my mouth caves in
Pouring a river of hate
My fingers pinch the skin at my waist
And underneath, carved into bone
Are the fine marks of hatred
Reflected eerily by the blank eyes
And it is easy to agree
With that brutal little voice
And the eyes that stare back at me
With a challenge;
*Try to smile.
I dare you.

This is how a girl will go mad
Waiting for a world that will never come
Devouring empty smiles and false promises
Made up to be shiny and beautiful
Hungry for what she cannot have.

This is how a girl will lose her mind
Watching an entire world
Coil down the drain in tendrils
Laced with blood and hope
Praying for the cuts to hurt this time

This is how you will watch her
Wither away quietly
Morbidly curious, slightly disdained
You will be a step or two removed
Certain she’ll be better on her own
That she does not need you.

This is the guilt you will feel
When you find her at your feet
And you realize a single word  
A whispered promise, though it would go unkept
Could have saved that little girl
Gone mad.

Her lips shiver, shatter like glass
Pepper the ground
Slice your aching feet
Yet you bend to collect the shards
Glue her back together, kiss
Her broken smile.

Her fingertips melt fire into
Your skin, but you don’t seem to mind
Don’t seem to mind that she inhales
Part of you every time
She breathes in too deep
She doesn’t seem to mind that your ribs crack
Beneath her palms
Each time her fingers trace your skin

She is the permanence of your spine
You are the ache in her chest.
So easily forgets when you fall
She will be the one to pull you to your feet
She forgets that as intertwined as she is
With you
You are an ending
Without her.

You are alone
Hands shoved deep within your pockets
As if you search for the secrets you’ve long since lost.
The winter's hush settles over you with grey sky
And, eyes closed, you let yourself move with
The rushing sounds of the river down below
As the snow begins to pepper the earth in silence.

Open your eyes
Remove your clenched fists from your pockets
Keep walking, this water is no friend to you
And the girl you dream about,
She waits for you far along the shore
In that white dress you've grown to love so much
Don’t you worry she’s cold?

The blood on my palms is ours
It is our blood smeared on these walls
Spilling over the thresholds
Staining the sheets.
They’ll take bleach to walls and the floors
Try to scrub us away almost as hard as I did
And the grit under their fingernails will look like mine
The copper smell of us will give way to ammonia
And years from now they’ll tell the story
Of the little girl gone mad
Taking an axe to her own heart
Just to numb the thunder pace
And that boy who found her
Took the pistol to silence the bedlam in his head
And ease the guilt in his chest.

Bleeding aches wait for days
Feeding on deliriously intertwined wounds
hungry
thigh
adoration
Bruise-claimed jaws and darkened hips don’t mind.
Exhale thorns minded inside by pretty electric blood
And nonsense moves the whiskey inside
Miraculous, macabre cancer.
Hello, our thoughts embraced,
Fed false weakness and colored reason,
The suns of souls fighting our own black shame.

The truth is
It’s 5:05 in the morning and sleep is at an impasse
With the coffee I had for dinner last night, today, this morning—
Time moves so slowly when it’s morningdark and
So many others are beginning their days while
I have yet to finish mine.
You are not among them,
Lurking just as I do somewhere in an inbetween;
You sit heavy in my thoughts
Anchoring them in an uncomfortable place,
Torn between missing you and hating you.
You are the poison in my system,
You’re that third cup of coffee keeping me deliriously awake.
But you’re also my miraculous antidote,
The full night’s sleep teasing
My bloodshot eyes and my perma-fried nerves.

Because the truth is, I love you more and more each day
Reaching a boiling point every time the sun finally gets to kiss the moon
hello, good morning
For the briefest of moments before he must say once more
farewell, goodnight.
The truth is, my love, I’ve spent all these nights missing you terribly
And I fear you’ve scarcely
Thought of me
At all.

Long ago, you planted lilies
in my ribcage, roses in my jaw
coaxed them to life, you fed them fire.
The roses grew thorns…
the lilies grew crooked

They got hungry in your absence,
******* at the metal inside. Quietly,
they began to die, turned black like bruise.  
Rotting and wilted, they slip to the floor,
still smelling like you.

Fingers burn my skin,
Lips scar mine.
Such a shame it is to love you,
So hard it is on            this                body
There isn’t an inch you haven’t claimed
Conquering rigid planes like they were
Yours for the taking
Breathe you in, exhale toxin.
You are cancer preying upon infection.
Footprints beat across my chest
A rusting tattoo, a reminder
Of the ones before you, the nothing
           After you.
Breathe me in, exhale reverence
As if I were your temple, something
            Worth loving.
Beneath, there is bruised and bleeding ache
Feeding upon every moment
You make me feel something bordering on ecstasy
It whispers
           Nothing good ever comes.
You are not good.  You are a dark thing.
We were borne of the same blackness
It crawled in us as infants while we slept
Twined us together. Tore every bit of us apart.
Cancerous love,
       Writing false notes of adoration in my skin
        While my insides bleed
        Waiting for the  
                  End.

You are not
The whine on my lips
Not the
Whiskey
Sitting crooked
Inside me.
You are not
The restless thing in my chest
Fighting the minded cage

You are
The violence beating in my chest
The nothingness that burns
That aches.
You are the fingers
Lifting the glass
To my lips
And the reason
I don’t
Sleep
At night.

Piece by piece, I'd let you take me apart; a mind, a body, a soul
Hidden between blood and sinew and bone
Destruction is a pretty, pretty thing when done by your hand.
Put me together, macabre puzzle of your own making
Skyscraper mural by your own design.
My love, you could have me so completely if only you knew how.

Skin electric
Words of mindless mangle
Trace the curve of your hips
Trickle along the stretch of thigh
Pools around your toes
Where the world used to lie
One moment of weakness made permanent
Scored in by blade and ink
Scarred friction

You are like nobody else
Hot breath on a cold night
The momentary brightness
Just after you’ve closed your eyes.
You are the brightest star in the darkest sky
The blood that boils under my colorless skin
The first and last word of a novel
The most brilliant novel
Filled with pages and pages of nonsense words
And brightly colored and breathtaking photographs
And the single page hidden in the middle
Telling your entire heartbreaking story
In sudden, vivid detail.
You are the rush in my ears and my vein
And the violent wind through my hair
And the violent crashing in my chest.
You are like nobody else
And so I love you.