when i am alone
i stand firm in myself
like a boulder in the ocean

but when i love
the tide is too strong
and i am too often swept away

why do i try so hard
to formulate my own center of gravity
if i so easily let someone else
become the moon around which i orbit

if i am a planet
with my own biome
why do i let someone else
control the weather

i am growing older
and i cannot flourish
without letting someone else
come along and destroy my garden

poems that rhyme
arent realistic
because life doesnt
flow that well

if im an optimist,
im naive
if im a pessimist,
im jaded

i took my shirt off
because it still smells like him
and since life is realistic
we dont rhyme

if im an optimist,
im left to fix my own broken stanza
if im a pessimist,
the poem is left unfinished

**** everyone who told me that poems were meant to rhyme

i never kept a diary for long
because i always found myself
ripping out the pages
of the memories that i didnt want to remember.

if my life were a book
ideally
half of the pages would be missing.

if my memory were a song
the melody would be
scrambled
by boughts of abrupt silence.

my skin feels
chafed
by eraser marks
even though erasers do not work on human flesh.

my brain feels
scrambled
by a large black scribble
desperately trying to cover the things i dont want to remember.

i wish to function as a clock
with wind up hands
so that i can tell time where to go instead.

i am ripping out my intestines
like vcr tape.

why are the memories still playing?

i would pour the stars from my irises
if it meant that you could see me
the way that i see you

the words used to flow
so freely from my brain

but then i grew older
the sky became
darker
the galaxy faded
like the peeling bumper stickers on my car

i forgot
what the milky way looked like from here

even if you cannot see me
i am shining
even if i am only an ember
i am reignited

the constellations have been restored
as i look at you
but i am
faded
to you
as the world once was
to me

and so ill let my feelings trail off
like a lukewarm ending
to what was meant to be a perfect fairytale

it is meant to be
give and take
not
push and pull

the effort
should not be
the struggle

i locked the door,
but even i do not know how to reopen it.