When my friend tells me he fell in love with a *******
he is crying. He tells me he should be happy,
that he gets to have *** with him whenever he can pay
but he knows the hands that hold him
are tight for grip instead of love.
It strikes me that sometimes
getting everything you want hurts more
than having nothing.

The love of my life never loved me back.
We only kissed once, and she had a crush on
some other guy anyway.
But I couldn't get enough of her.
Whenever she cried I felt
like I couldn't breathe.
And the next time I would
see her smile my pulse would quicken,
as if my blood was trying to get out to
show her that our hearts were
still pounding at us.
And who knows. Maybe love will come
back to me. Maybe this time it will
look at me and smile.
But I will always remember that kiss.
The way she leaned towards me in the dark
so she could deny it ever happened in the morning
and filled me with such electricity
I wanted to cry, because I've never felt
more alive than when I was on fire.

My best friend tells me that she was born in the wrong time.
That her viking ancestors would be ashamed of how much
she can't handle. How she's no warrior.
So I take her to a powwow that my sister's dancing at
and let her feel the vibrations of the drums
pound through her feet.
I tell her maybe our war drums are our heartbeats.
She's fighting herself and using razors as her soldiers.
I say, if you need sharp things let's use arrows to figure
out where east is so we can run towards the rising sun
like my ancestors did.
We can use words as our shield walls in battle
and I can be the dragon head on your ship
to scare off the enemy in dark and foggy times.
If you want to get a little pagan I'll burn all my sage for you
and we can pray to all the gods we've heard stories of.
I'll teach you all the tricks my shima’ sani taught me.
We are warriors. But is it selfish of me to hope that you
never go to Valhalla? I want you to live long after
the fighting ends.

I was six the first time I peed my pants in
the dark basement of my grandma's house
rather than face my grandfather upstairs
who slept in front of the bathroom door
so we couldn't use it at night.

I haven't spoken a word in almost a month.
I don't use notes or ASL or charades
to get my message across instead,
because I have nothing to say.
What bothers me the most is,
when I finally open my mouth,
they still won't be ready to listen.

You hear it all the time. It's cliche, it's played out.
God it's so boring. Get over it.
You get over it.
Then one night you look at your life
and you hate her for it.
Why did she make you if
she didn't want you?
If she was going to walk out on you
and leave you with a father who
didn't mind getting violent.
If she was going to marry again
and have two perfect little girls
who are going to get the childhood
that should have been yours.
If she wasn't going to save you.
If she wasn't going to come back for you,
even though she promised she would.
If she was going to look the other way
after you told her you were eating an
apple for dinner for the fourth night
in a row because dad forgot to feed you again.
When she knew that her and dad both came
from a long line of mental instability,
why did she decide to pass that on?
Why would she make you,
if she wasn't going to love you?

A blue whale's heart is so big a small child
could swim around in its veins.
I was trying to be the whale,
now I'm choking on my
******* heart.

In my family, we don't
handle emotions well.
We all use coping
mechanisms. And then
we mock each other for
it, they look down on
everyone for being so
weak as they indulge in
their addictions behind
their backs. My aunt
used to rub her skin raw,
my sister burns herself,
my parents got into as
many fights as they could
(with themselves, but
mostly with strangers.
They liked getting ******.
Making other people bleed.)
So what if I wash my hands
more than normal, or
******* a certain number
of times, or thrum my
fingers to beats of three when
I'm nervous, or try to bleed
out my problems, or bruise
myself, or starve myself.
It's just another way to live.

"Well now I can go 41 hours without sleep and I only need one meal a day, and a small snack every other day. I'm also testing the different healing times and patterns of different injuries with different levels of treatment and different places on the body. For instance, cuts bleed more on hands, but heal faster. However, burns take more time to heal on hands, especially if it's from cigarettes instead of lighters."

"So you're sleep depriving yourself, starving yourself, cutting yourself, and burning yourself?"

No.

"It's just experimenting. Everything's completely under control."

There's something incredible about being human.
I can tell you that I feel empty, and you don't
try to figure out which organs went missing.
When I tell you I can't get up in the morning,
you don't check my legs.
If I explain that I feel small and lost
and worthless and alone
and like I need to bleed
out the pain.
You know what I mean,
you understand.
What's incredible about human beings,
is that when I tell you this ****,
you can completely relate,
and walk away.

It's never taught that the vikings
discovered America long before
Columbus did. Some people never
even take the time to check the "facts."
You were the first to get to me.
It wasn't talked about, no words
were even exchanged that night.
(It was easy with you. Natural.
Inevitable. Simple. Wanted so much.)
It wasn't taught.
But you were the first,
not she.

I love how every time I ask, "How goes it?"
You always say, "It goes."
Sometimes being nice
can be addicting,
But I want to *******
so hard my slap will be an
"I love you."
I hold open doors for
everyone I see,
I'm the nicest
****** person you'll
ever meet and
I can't help but wish
you'd slice me open so
I could bind you up
and make you mine.
I love how ******* crazy
the way your lips make me
when you smoke a cigarette.
I wish you would call me a *****
so I could cause bruising.
That night I bit your lip hard
enough to draw blood
you smiled like you knew
it was the most beautiful
thing I would ever see.

I learned today that
seismographs measure the
force of earthquakes and
I was struck by how similar
these spikes looked to
waveforms and
I wonder if the earth
is screaming at us

We became killers because we did
not have value for our own lives.
We were all fighting because that's
all we knew how to do. We fought
to gain something, to feel something.
Monsters, all of us. But we didn't care.
The thrill of it was what kept us going.
The scent of blood sweet to our senses.
But one day, a boy was face-to-face
with his mother
who did not hesitate to raise her gun.
His eyes were opened to the madness.
He went crazy with the realization
that we doomed ourselves.

He smiled
and a gunshot was heard that night.

She gives me a ***
filled with soil and tells me,
"I wanted to give you
a flower but I didn't want
to make you cry by
killing something so
I thought you could watch
my love grow for you."

When I look in the mirror
I see the face of a broken man.
I remember what my mother said
that if you pull an expression that grotesque
your face will get stuck that way.

I wish someone would love me.
I wish someone would care that
when I came out of my room
my eyes were still a little red.
I want someone to hold me
and tell me that it's okay to fall apart.
To understand that I can't
help but hurt myself.
Someone who would understand
that I can't just get over it.
I wish I wasn't so lonely all the time.

Hell, my pillow has soaked up
so many tears
it's amazing I don't drown
when I dream.

The monster grows bigger and
it claws at my mind
My arms are torn apart
with maps showing the path
to the only place that ever
felt like home
My problem?
I've always had a fondness
for monsters

I don't exist anymore.
Too suicidal to function,
I sleepwalk 'round this world.
I stare at walls
stare at my dead eyes
in the mirror.
Awakened only at night
when my blade can breathe
some air into me.
I can't talk anymore.
I can't laugh anymore.
And, what's worse, nobody
seems to miss me.

All my life I
wanted to fly
so I jumped off
a cliff
just to
feel alive.

Everyone keeps telling me
how lucky I am
just to be alive.
They say, "If the car
had been going just
2mph faster."
or
"If it had just hit your head
an inch to the right."
They say, "You should be dead!"
And all I can think is,
*Yeah, I should be dead.

You're such a loser.
You rode your bike into traffic
and didn't even have the
decency to die.
You pretended to be modest
in the hospital so that
they wouldn't raise the gown
above your knees, so that
they wouldn't see your scars.
You etched I'M STILL HERE
into your skin,
and you don't know whether
that's a good thing or
a bad thing anymore.

*I'm such a loser.
I couldn't even die.

I tell my friend as I burn alive,
"please remember me as
I left. A form of insanity."
He adds more gasoline
to my hands, to my eyes
which reach out to him
begging him to revolutionize
with me.
He tells me it's my fault
that I chose to be like this
that I chose to burn.
He screams that I
had no right to lose my mind
to leave him in reality
to leave him pathetic
--lovely
--hateful
He hates me.
I tell him that when he
makes angels in the snow
of my ashes
to think of when he
kissed me.
"******," he whispers
into my ear
and I know he still loves me.

And as we kissed
and lay in my bed
she pulled up my sleeves
and saw the grotesque scars
from years of sadness

For the first time
I felt nothing when I
looked at my arms
It didn't look like mine
it didn't fit how happy
I felt with her

She pulled down
my sleeves
and walked out
the door

I am having a love affair with sharp objects.
I look in the mirror and all I see is
the blood, the scars.
Makes me sick, makes me hate myself.
And yet, I can't stop.
I shake with the need to tear myself apart
and watch as the pain inside me
trickles out in the form of blood
and all that's left is the physical.
The pain reminds me what is real
as I struggle to win the war with my mind.
I have been held hostage for so long
I seem to have forgotten how to live
so I have been driven to this.
The pain lets me out like a
breath held too long.
I am not numb, not sad
and when I am
I am not so for long.

When I was a kid
I used to wonder
how many people would
cry if I disappeared.
So I ran away
for two days.
Nobody even noticed.

I'm scared to write poetry.
I dig too deep, I go too crazy.
It's like alcohol--drugs.
Poetry will **** me someday,
one day I will realize just how much
I hate myself.

It has been two months
four days, and sixteen hours
since I last picked up a pen.
I'm sorry. I'm ready now.
I'm here.

You broke your promise.

I keep expecting the phone to go off
"I'm sorry, I was just ******* with you."
And I'd yell that you had no idea
how much that hurt.

I didn't see it coming (who does?)
We were laughing and then
I was crying.

I keep remembering the good things about you.
You made me happy again,
I stopped seeing my shrink (stupid idea)
You made me take off my mask.

You were the one person I trusted not to leave
I'd even have nightmares about it,
but you promised me that you were
here forever.

*******.

I'm wading in gray water, it lures me
I'm waiting for a dream to choke on now
The music crescendos when I scrape knees
But me and the dancer still take our bow
The water kisses my lips then my nose
I'm gone because I never met happy
For the cons will always outweigh the pros
But you never saw me being sappy
"I love you! Be mine!" the water will say
And I gladly submerge myself in it
The whales will come and carry me away
I'll find my Becoming an Undine kit
Suffice it to say I could never dream
Of such a silent, so hidden a scream

We became creatures again
trying to pass for human
disguises made up only of lies
but that’s okay
because, well,
who could it hurt?
We’ll be mercenary wolves
hunting down anyone
who figures out the truth
and we’ll leave
with tails—heads high
because we fooled everyone

We want.
We are wanting.
We car-crash our bodies beautiful
and relish in the pieces.
And we are scared.
We see the eyes of people,
our people,
who long to live in a world
where they aren't hated.
We cry for them.
For us.
We scream it in our music
and whisper it in writing.
The price for wanting:
guilt and shame.
But we still show up
because the absurdity of being us
it what keeps us living.

Machines with an infinite
capacity for self-deception.
To avoid pain we rationalize
minimize
go numb.
Instead we turn to
things that should make us happy
but only hurt
like getting wasted.
We run away
again and again and again.
Again.
We tell ourselves
that we are happy,
putting on smiles tailored
to dead eyes.
We don't consider that maybe
rebellion to this system
is the only way.

Room messy from
frustration of bottled in
feelings,
arms ****** from
breaking glass,
voice gone from screaming.
I'm exploding.
And I can't stop it.

It was never supposed to be this hard
just to get up in the morning.
I wasn't supposed to be sad
all the **** time,
for no reason.
Poetry used to spill out my mouth
but now it comes from
shaky fingers
rough and tired.
It never occurred to me that one day
I would have scars to hide
or days spent being empty.
Heads down, don't speak.
Exaggerate and lie.
Don't let them get to you.
Don't let them touch you.
I wish I knew what was wrong with me.

Sometimes the cold numbness
swallows me whole.
I sit there for hours
eyes vacant
and I don't know how
to come back to life.
Could you teach me?
I can't feel the thought
that this will pass;
no hope.
*I could live here,
in this state of mind.

I was always moving from place to place
there were new faces and empty houses
leaving before we got too comfortable
in one place, we always had each other though
so there was never any need for a
                                                        real home.

                                                      ­                                                                M­y sisters and I would climb mountains
                                                       ­                                                    stealing pomegranates from our teacher’s yard
                                                            ­                                                                 ­            and sitting on the dusty rocks
                                                           ­                                                         everythi­ng was good because we were on
                                                              ­                                                   top of the
                                                             ­                                         world

In every new neighborhood I would see
all the girls and boys in different groups
they found it strange that I would wrestle
instead of play with dolls
and that’s what we did; we wrestled until
black eyes were handed out like
sweet
candy.
                                                         ­                                                                 ­  No matter where we were we always
                                                          ­                                             made our way to grandma’s house for Christmas
                                                       ­                                                    keeping traditions and breathing in that loving
                                                          ­                                                              air­, I wanted the world to stop and wait
                                                            ­                                             they always sang out for God while I whispered
                                                       ­                                                                 ­                               where are
                                                                ­                                                                 ­                                      you?

The swings were my friends when I
was in school and I would spend a lifetime
on them, looking at the sky as if I could
just fly away and never come back
in those days I was a dreamer because I saw that
a world was contained
           on those swings.




                                                     ­        I guess you could say writing found me
                                                           these smudge-filled hands still ink stained
                                                         ­    and the words spilling out on the paper
                                                           ­ turning shaky abc’s into emotions with
                                                            ­ names and colors and witty come-backs
                                                      ­         because nothing else sounds and feels
                                                           ­                        quite as
                                                              ­                            good.

Sometimes I look at the
people around me.
All of us walking around these
halls of a school.
Heads down.
Eyes down.
Mouths shut.
I wonder what happened to us.
What caused us to become these
creatures that are paralyzed?
What happened to the bright-eyed
kids we were?
Where is the laughter that used to
echo through us?
We wear the chains of today,
and what's worse is
we keep them there with our own power.

They don't understand
that if I don't keep
things clean
bad will happen
unsafe will happen
so keep everything in
three's.

You hold me in your arms
Both of us wearing nothing
but T-shirts.
I wonder about your boyfriend
what this makes us.
But I know you won't
pick me over him.
I feel cold despite the
warm of the alcohol
and I hate you as I love you.
This quiet will eat me alive
and I wait for the moment
that I can't take it anymore.
Until I can't believe that we
slept together
and it all seems like a dream.
Please let this be a dream.

I want to wake up to
a different Christmas
a different family
a different me.
Gifts that aren't hinting
at the fact that I'm
a freak
like dresses because they hate
how I want to be a boy
makeup and stupid heels
gift card to a salon
teen romance novels.
This is my family's
Passive Aggressive Day.
Trash Day.
Return-to-Sender.

Who ever said to you
that we'd
win?
Run, Arschloch.
Beware of fainting spells.
Your puppet hands reach
for my robot face
"I love you" she says,
the words dripping from her mouth.
Stand straight. Speak up.
"Stop it with that writing nonsense!"
You'll do fine, I promise.
I promise.

Death.
She watches us.
We march.
We see her take those around us.
I know you, I think.
But she won't take me,
no matter how much I watch her,
not yet.
Maybe she'll take me in the
next march.
In another lap.
Another laugh.
I'm drowning in
grayness, in clouds.
In the people that watch
their eyes wide.
She pauses to look again,
make her mocking acts
of not coming for me.
We march.

Run.


Run!

Through this forest,
faster faster.
The moon is leading you to her,
the trees guiding the path
for you.
Don't turn now.
She's waiting at the top.
Barefoot
the rocks bite at your feet.
Keep running.
Almost there now,
feel your heart beat
throbbing, throbbing
in your head.
Meet her.
Go to her.
Good, you're at the edge.
Now just
l
e
a
p . . .

Good.
Do you see her?
She's kissing you.
She holds you in the air,
telling you to look at the
moon.
Her hands open to you
as you throw yourself
into her dark hair.
You fall,
how long have you been falling?
Hours?
Years?
Your whole life?
You're not scared.
Not anymore.
Just keep looking at that moon
and feel the dark
devour you.
Love her.

We are monsters in this forest
We are ugly and terrifying
Scaring off anything that happens
to see us
Twirl and see the trees become
a portal, a dome, anything
The fire cracks and hisses at us
As we roar our secrets out
giving them to each other, to the stars
to whatever
We go crazy because it's better
than feeling sad or mad
Or anything else that ends with a d
We find comfort in the music
that plays in our heads
that won't go away
and leaves us dancing
until we forget that we are monsters

Child sleeping in my arms
I think
'Don't become me.'

I'll be good next time.
I promise.
I'll be a good daughter.
Just stop hitting me, mommy.

I won't mess up again,
and I won't make any noise,
I'll never make trouble for you again.
Just stop yelling, mommy.

I'll cook better dinners,
and clean the whole house.
You don't have to worry
about a thing.
Just stop drinking, mommy.

I'll hide the bruises more carefully,
and I'll never run away.
I'll be here when you need me,
gone when you hate me.
Just stop crying, mommy.

I'll be better.
I love you, mommy.

You **** me.


You eat me alive with
how much I love you
how much
I can't love you.

You comfort me when
I'm terrified to be loved
and when I need you
you're nowhere
to be
f o u n d.

Who the hell are you,
to be the person I need?!
How could you go
from being a complete stranger
to my best friend?

You scare me.

It breaks my fragile,
porcelain heart,
whenever you tell me
that you're crying.
Or that you can't go on living.
Or that you're in so much pain.
Or when you say that you know me better than anyone
because it's true.

It terrifies me that you
love me.

In a world of words
ready to pierce the soul of the
hollow hearted and
seek out those pretenders
who deny their souls to death.
And the cry of a gun,
in complete harmony with
mourning loved ones of someone
who died in the name of that sick fear.