My used to be second family sat behind us.
The walls of the courtroom beat me more than my heart could.
It was not my choice,
The order of protection was forced.
I was forced to tell the detectives what my parents wanted to hear.
All of this happened because I made a mistake.
I chose a blondie over a brown eyed beauty.
Now for a whole year my best friend is gone.
His family hates me.
Nothing will be the same.
Adams street will always be dull,
And when I walk down that street more moths are born in my stomach than the hope I told you too keep.
Now I hope.
I hope court didn't sever everything we had.
Straight up.

Narcotics
Derived from
***** resonates your skin

Getting sleep at night erases
Bags that drip over the cliff of
Your cheekbones that twisted tour smile psychoactive.

The tissue that lies beneath your skin soaks sedatives
That meditate to the ecstasy seeping Secrets to our family
You missed Thanksgiving dinner last year.

Now I'm sitting in front of you staring
At your veins  blue with blood now flushed with heroine

The holes on your shirt matched the ones between the crevice of your arms.

You shrug me away and
Say "hold on bird"

Dart 1: I did the dishes
Dart 2: I cleaned my room
Dart 3: I mailed my thank you letters
Dart 4: I walked the dog.

My mom and I love to play darts.
She always hits the bullseye,
I always hit the second ring never being being able to match her superiority.
Begging her to let me win,
she doesn't  understand that I don't know how to play as well as she does.
After all she was a teenager at one point,
She did learn to shoot lies as darts,
But I'm still learning how to skin the truth with the feathers of my own darts.
I ask her what the score is,
'Mads, you're down by four, if you actually did what you were told and followed the rules of the game, maybe you wouldn't be so behind.'
I was always down by four.
And it was always for the same reasons:

Dart 1: I did the dishes
Dart 2: I cleaned my room
Dart 3: I mailed my thank you letters
Dart 4: I walked the dog

I've been playing this game for 17 years,
The needle of a dart is sharp especially with the venom of my mothers tongue.
I ran up to my room,
Shutting my door so they didn't puncture the filth buried beneath my pores,
Oozing truth that I didn't want to face.
They dug the tips of their teeth into my door.  
They were shooting in through my window so I pushed myself back to the door,
But they locked it.
Collapsed on the ground I sat there rocking myself.
Letting the lies scrape at the bullseye that my body played on.
I dragged my tears like war paint across the cliff of my cheeks,
present my target to the open door.
Time to play another round,
Time to face the darts that I have made.

Humans.
Different races,
Different colors,
Different traditions,
Different environments,
We've never paid our debts from our wars,
But what got us there anyway?
Differences.
We've never been named brothers.
We've never learned to accept.
We've never learned to love.
But when did we ever?
We all hold a shovel.

Mr. Snowhiteman,              
You saw her stemmed to her caramel glazed heels.
Her fair white meat was young but not mealy.
She was wrapped in a cloth of crisp ironed red silk skin that glazed her bust and rounded her *****.
You couldn't help but notice the cinnamon that spiced her cheeks.                         Mr. Snowhiteman,              
You introduced her to the enchantment of your poisoned washed walls,
while your fingers became peelers and sliced her silk skin down to her bare meat.                
You couldn't help but take a bite.                           Crisp.                                    
Sweet.                                  
Ripened.                            
Mr. Snowhiteman,                
You were so hungry you left her fair meat bruised.                                
Her skin was peeled off of her,                                And her innocence harvested.

It's teeth gouge through the gloss of my eyes,
I hang there from my skull,
Heavy footed soaked from its saliva
Spine dripping from my back,
I am silent.
It hunches over me,
The humidity from its pores summon the hairs on my body to arise,
Awakens domes erupting from my skin,
I am no longer human, but its apprentice.
It is strong.
Hovering,
Ready to showe me a different phase of my future death.
I pinch myself to rip skin away from a bad bond,
I am sweating and whimpering in fetal position on the sidewalk.

Someone who makes me feel like I matter, is worth much more than matter itself.

Thinking about you is my sanity, but if I think about you too much is it insane?

I have officially decided, the insane sanity is the best insanity.

If bridges are broken when you burn them, why do we build them in the first place.

What's the warranty and terms of condition of love again?

It was a mistake,
We both made it.
We both have consequences.
Relationships can't dictate our lives.
We can still function even though it may not be exactly the same.
Remember the restriction is only temporary.
Hold on with me please.
We can go back to the way things were,
I'm telling you it's just a rough patch,
I promise.

I woke up with my arms boa constricted around my pillow,
Superstition says that it means you miss someone.
For six weeks it's been about the distance of the speed of light for us.
When we are far away with the switch turned off we worry,
Or we are scared,
Something is just out of place.
When we are with eachother,
The switch turns on and feelings are there instantly.
Ever since I've been suction cupped to my parents rules,
I've stopped walking over to your house.
It's haulted me from being myself.
You say you have patience?
I hate to be testing it,
But let's wait these restrictions out.

What happened.
I wish the summers clock would turn clockwise and take me back to those moments.
What happened to the 7 hour facetime calls,
The '**** yea i'll come over I'd love to see you',
The 'I'll chase you endlessly' attitude.
Where did the boy who used to build shrines of me go.....
You used a piece of my torn up Jean shorts to worship me.
Why can't you pick me up early in the morning,
Draw me those cute 'Shel Silverstein' type poems and pictures.
How am I supposed to have a morning without them.
I look back into my Box of Your things
See nothing but summers and
Spoken word showcases,
Nothing but memories of pushing me into a bush covered in snow,
When we used to walk arm in arm,
And tell our little stories.
Take me back to the moment when we were in the CVS,
You brought me three flowers,
no bigger than the size of my little finger,
You got down on one knee,
Held them up,
And jokingly asked 'will you marry me.'
Tell me why I still have those,
Tell me why I took it seriously, and kept them.
As the flower flakes it's petals so did the contents of the relationship,
I'm not allowing it to end up a Beauty and the Beast fairytale,
So I guess you've grown up...
Hormones changing,
Development in the mind happening,
Why does it have to change the availability gauge.
So you have been holding back your true feelings,
and you broke some news to me.
You weren't too happy with the relationship,
It didn't feel equal on account to a collective sort of people.
Change.
That's a big word.
We all change,
And it all means something.

'Keep your chin up kid',
shake hands with your shadow,
the gum that sticks to the bottom of your shoe is the stuff your stuck with.
Don't go picking it off because once it's gone you have nothing to stick to.
It's simple.

I will muffle tears behind colored speakers, image is everything.

I 'am' happy
there is just some parental tension and stress and a constant struggle on trying to momentarily please people who are sticking there two cents down my throat slots.
Cha-Ching goes Maddie and they've hit the jackpot of hurling cold hard attitude.

I can twist and spit insults with fevers of 105.

Waste (wāst) v.     (1.) To use, consume, spend, or expend thoughtlessly or carelessly:    For hours on end we laid waste beneath the plastered moon. Our hands mimicked the stars weaved between a silked sky. The grass imprinting tallies into our back.      
(2.) To cause to lose energy, strength, or vigor; exhaust, tire, or enfeeble:  The tar wasted your lungs. It was the nicotine talking. We could never have a safe argument and now you are telling me that I am too much of a nice guy. Nicotine is the crutch between the crunch in the cracks that pry through the truth.      (3.)To fail to take advantage of or use for profit; lose: You wasted an opportunity to be with me. You are missing the reverberation of our laughs under the viaduct, and the tickle attacks when we played hide and seek.    (4.) a. To destroy completely. b. Slang. To ****; ******. The cigarettes wasted our relationship. My eyes couldn't take the second hand jaundice, being the second pair of wells you flipped your wishes into, this second pairs of eyes that understood you. Now they draw blank when they see you.     (5.) Garbage; trash. You had the audacity to keep your lips coiled to the cigarettes, than throw them in the waste basket. Countless weeks of me having to take them off your counter, from inside your purse, your backpack, I chose to become your waste basket. I carried your four year burden in my pockets. (6.) Regarded or discarded as worthless or useless. You were a waste of my time, a waste of my feelings, wasted space in my life.

He's the smoker
                        I'm the drinker but together
              we make the perfect

                                 buzz.

Love is never average when I am with you.
When I say I love you I mean:
I take you into my heart,
My desires,
pain and suffering,
Longing,
My dreams are full of your dedication,
What I mean by I love you is:
I gather up the physics of your footsteps,
Calculate your directions,
Analyze your pace,
The arc plane of which your hair falls,
I measure love in:
The beauty of your voice,
The conciliatory effect it has into the art of my body,
The soul train of your rhymes,
Your rhythm,
how they reverberate between the walls of my ears,
How you pinball between cerebral sections that cause me to taste the half notes between the bars of your lips,
I feel love by:
You holding my waist,
Gripping me to safety,
Letting my hips and thighs and cheekbones my rounded jawline,
That the the gaps between your fingers can be filled with my curves.
What I mean by I love you is:
The distortion of my hyper ****** drive to mute into intimacy.
Not to disperse,
But to love.
To lift control to the surface,
To caress,
not to be driven and forced,
What I mean by love is:
How I define the impact of you on me.

It wasn't us that cracked the whip of history, we were the licks of an imposter.
We were the shame,
and the honest savior.
For us,
Self pity doesn't exist,
Guilt is a motif of our race.

I am hidden.
The earth skips over the soles of my shoes...
I won't be the one missing the point,
But One day the earth will trip and I will be standing on it.
*Will power.

The sky reached down, groped my eyes to see clear.

He rusted bruises around my wrist, metallic to the bone.

My thoughts got stuck to the fan and now they are getting flung everywhere.
What a nasty mess.

I am waiting for the day that my dreads will uncoil insults to those who don't respect them.
        That day will never come because they won't uncoil.
              I won't let my intensity show.
I will only let it grow on.

Grass.
     Rain.
           clouds.
And open field.
                   Bare feet let the mud climb the walls between their toes.  Let the grass greet them with a coiled handshake.  Each dew drop will trace a vein.
Nature.

Winter of 2003
I won't hang my head past February,
Or let the obstacles I face stamp my feet into a statistic.
You left me, 10 years old, with a baby that's hand coiled around my finger like a ring that was two sizes too small.
I would use sweat to lubricate his grip but,
He was to precious to remove, so I let him choke the circulation until it looked like your eye makeup before you left for "work".
Painful.
A 10 year old, with ten fingers, perfect to cook 10 chicken nuggets I got for $2.67.
He only had ten teeth but I only had 10 dollars that you earned from spending ounces of Smirnoff wasting away your body to the underground public.
Early Spring 2003
He calls me 'Mom' instead of 'Maddie'.
The bathtub in our apartment would always slump,
I would grip handfuls of his rolls to save him from drowning,
water leaked into the grout of the tile, drawing mold between the carpet causing our conversations to rot,
They were no longer sweet,
The expiration date was February 1st  when you planned another baby.
Summer 2008
You kicked me out,
I spent each day with my feet scorching,
Barbecuing on the charcoal grill of Las Vegas streets.
I couch hopped from friend to friend,
sometimes slept in the rain gutter to stake out for the night.
I still knew your hours,
kept my journal close, dragged my guitar case behind me, occasionally stopped by the house to see him all grown up, only at 8 years old.
He would leave chicken nuggets on the front window sill, the dragging of my guitar case gave me away.
September 10th, 2011
You let me back into the house,
My little brother of 8 years old slept in my bed for 3 weeks straight.

1.4 million teens become runaways each year.
I won't let you stamp my feet into a statistic.
Runaway isn't my choice.

Fall 2014

Still standing.

We grew up together,
all 14 years of your life.
Our feet would dance raw on sandpaper
and our laughter sat on the heat.
Vegas was a tough for you.
In the bathrooms at school I would watch your eyes fall from their sockets,
with every hug tolerated your nails chalked into my back,
I sat through every insult tug your eardrum from your head.
My assistance wasn't enough.
You missed nearly 4 days of school and weren't answering my emails or phone calls.
It was like nobody was home.
I ditched school the next day and ran my worries to your doorstep until my lungs were blistered.
I tangled my feet up the stairs twice.
Broke the bathroom door and found your
body limp with your head facedown in the sink,
lip caught in the drain,
fingers were vines in between the handles,
I just sat there,
cradling your body.
Your patience dried up,
and you were thirsty,
but in the desert of Las Vegas,
water is scarce.

They ain't  got *****,
They can't have *****,
Ugh they always go to Starbucks and order a frappuccino "**** them rich uppity white ******* get on my nerves."
They all listen to One Direction and 5 Seconds of Summer,
"I really wish I had white girl hair."
All white girls have to be this, have to do that,
This is my average day at school.
It's not true.
I know because I am a white girl
But I'm not your "typical" one,
I listen to Pantera and Phish,
I don't "always" go to Starbucks.
And I have an *** thank you very much,
I'm not rich,
I'm not poor,
I have the same anatomic structure as everybody else,
I don't need to be singled out for something that isn't true about me.
White people aren't the only that can have stereotypes made about them.

I left the water boiling sanity into the pores of my skin as my face hovered over the ***,
My eyes close to the beat of Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd.
The countdown.
5
4
3
2
I stopped the timer before 1,
Let the water scorch the tea leaves until their screams fuse to a whisper at the bottom of the mug.
I needed my sanity back,
So I lifted the mug and let the flavor of peppermint wash between the chapped cracks of my lips,
Steaming the melody of sanity onto my tongue,
my tea was cold.

My mother is my seamstress,
lapping around a genetic retail store,
she had 23 chromosomes to spend.
Knitting freedom’s peach fuzz fabric over the inseam of  muscles,
cross stitching stereotypes of blonde thread into the pores of a rounded scalp,
hot-gluing  privilege into blue eyes,
kneading the molds of a thigh gap between legs of the race that would shame its way to superiority.
I am white.
My mother was my seamstress,
she made sure the licks of discrimination didn’t scar my back.