Alone in a public bathroom,
she stared at her reflection,
looking straight into her own
blood-shot eyes.

Her jaw was clenched
as was her shaking hand,
tightly gripping a worn, yellow notebook.

She looked fiercely into her eyes-
bright blue in contrast to her midnight black hair-
and whispered,
in a soft voice,
“You are not going to die tonight.”

Her eyes turned to focus on the yellow notebook,
still clenched in her sickly hand.
She flipped through page after page,
each filled with her
small, messy penmanship.

Turning away from the mirror,
she kicked open a stall door
and proceeded to tear out
page after page,
each filled with her
deliberately placed stanzas,
and crumpled each.

Her pale hands
threw each page into the toilet
in the ***** public bathroom.
Her blue eyes
watched the ink bleed
and bleed
until her words became
unrecognizable.

Without flushing,
the dark-haired girl vacated the stall.
Her blue eyes turned back to the mirror
and she saw her thin, pallid lips
yell the words,
“YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DIE TONIGHT”

Can I write you
a really articulate letter?

Will you write me one back?

Will you look at my word choice
and know that I didn't use a thesaurus,
but just the storage of words
I've collected?

Can you smile a little
when I scribble out
a terrible joke?

Will you fold up the torn-out
notebook paper
and put it in your pocket?

Please?

She is the type of person
that no one will ever write about.

She's quiet
and the color of whatever wall
stands behind her.

There's something in her
downcast
watery eyes
that says quietly, “don't mind me.”

She makes herself small enough
to almost,
just almost,
disappear completely.

Her smile is hidden away,
in fact,
I've only seen it once or twice.

I may be the only one in the world
to ever look at her closely enough
to notice
the quiet light
behind her light blue eyes
but I know that if someone else had seen it
they wouldn't have cared.

No one will ever give a thought
to this puddle of a girl.
I'm not sure anyone even knows her name.

She's the type of girl
no one will ever write about,

but here I am
writing 32 lines
about a girl
who I will never meet.

There was a man
sitting at the end of the bar
so I bought him a drink.

“Thank you, miss,”
he said.
I smiled
and left the bar
being carried by gusts of warm wind.

I went to my apartment
and cleaned the entire place
blasting music
loud enough for the neighbors
to hear.

I drew large,
colorful
pictures
and taped them to the wall
by my bed
to look at from time to time.

I drank an entire bottle of wine,
white wine,
and went to sleep
wrapped in warm blankets
and warm thoughts.

The next morning
I woke up with a smile
taking up residence on my face.

Then I opened the door
and almost stepped out into the hall
before the cold, gray
ghosts
pushed me into the pool
of cold, ***** water.

I sat on the floor
wrapped in blankets
but unable to ward off the cold.

I banged my head on a table,
repeatedly
but didn't feel a thing.

I looked at all of the bottles
of pills
that I had collected.
And I contemplated taking a few
or the whole bottle.

But I didn't.

I downed half a bottle
of *****
and hated myself.

I looked at myself,
scowling in the mirror.
“Go **** yourself,”
I told the reflection.

All of the sudden
the warmth came back
and I put flowers in a vase
and gazed at them lovingly.

I smiled at myself in the mirror,
proud of who I was
and everything I had ever done.
I thought excitedly
about everything I would do tomorrow,
the next day
and the next day.

Then I purposely knocked the flowers
off the table
with my closed fist
and downed an entire bottle of pills.

The rattling
of an empty plastic water bottle
on a trash-ridden street
at 3 a.m.
is so exceedingly hopeless
that it makes me want to
jump.

Seeing the two drops of water
lingering in the bottom
causes me to untie
my beat-up shoes,
take off
my plain grey socks,
and place them in a neat
and hopeless
pile
next to the overpass.

The label
peeling away from the bottle
forces me to climb over the railing
onto the little ledge,
high above the busy street
below.

Glancing at the forlorn
plastic water bottle,
I prepare to jump.

A ****** homeless man
shuffles down the ***** street
picks up the bottle
and puts it in his bag.
“'scuse me miss,
do ya have any spare change?”

I stare at him with dead eyes
and begrudgingly climb down
from the railing.

I hate poetry
about flowers
and springtime
or love
or the feeling of your darling's hand
or her ******* lips.

Poetry should make you really
burn
but some burn
more like sitting at a baseball game
in the sun
and you forgot to put on sunscreen
and you hate baseball.

I like poems
written late at night
with your brain blasted
on adderall
or coffee
or cheap *****.

Write
when your veins are filled with acid
when you're eating mac n cheese
made in the splattered microwave
with a broken plastic fork
and maybe even some broken dreams.

I like poems
when you're miserable
sitting in the sun
when all you want
is some ******* rain
to complement your melancholy mood
but the sun still ******* shines.

Untied shoelaces
and empty plastic water bottles
rolling down trash-filled streets
should take the pen out of your hand
and write some poetry for you.
Poetry about desperation
and drugs
and commonplace things
that drive you to the edge of a cliff.

I like poems
about that stupid pen
that won't work
so you scribble in the margin
but it still
won't
*******
work.

Maybe I don't like poems at all.
Maybe I just like
sounding pretentious
like some Bukowski wannabe
or maybe
I just like poems about
pretentious
Bukowski
wannabes.

Either way,
**** those *******
flowers.

She typed her poems in size 6 font
afraid of someone
reading over her shoulder.

She was a writer
afraid to share what she had written.

She knew
that she had revealed too much of herself
too much of the part of herself
that she keeps hidden,
suppressed.

To have someone read what she wrote
and know about her,
terrified her.

Yet she kept writing
knowing that it was what she wanted to do,
what she had to do.

If she didn't write,
no one would ever know anything
about her.

So she wrote
and proofread
deciding how much of herself
to reveal.

She would delete
and modify
until it seemed as if she was
an anonymous poet.

Yet someone always could tell
that it was her
doing the writing.

So she shared her poem
anyways.