when I say last year I hit an all time low,
I mean that I spent two hundred and eighty nine days without sunlight,
I’ve never known a rose to grow immersed in eternal night -
auctioned off my heart for the gift of sight,
I wonder how long I’ve lived my life blinded by the rose tinted glass?
false love will have you struggling to distinguish between gold and brass.
I draw out the sequence.
your palms met her flesh,
my reflection in the mirror is reduced to ash.
I feel my heart hit the floor,
blood stains in the carpet - proof that love does not live here anymore
next time just wrap them around my neck,
I get the same hand of cards
out of every single deck.
from love,
suffocating, choking,
that is the only sensation I have come to expect,
you know that better than me,
extinguished every fire set to your trees,
don’t you remember?
she left everything around you to burn,
choked on all the smoke,
still you fixated on all the ember,
if this body was ever not hollow,
I wouldn’t remember.
two hundred and eighty nine days,
I spent treading in the shallow,
moulded my existence out of clay just to fill another persons shadow.

I’ve spent twenty three years at war,
so when he looks at me,
he doesn’t ask why I haven’t gotten up off the floor,
doesn’t know that I’ve played this game before,
and I choose paper,
specifically the paper I used to write my first poem,
the piece of paper where I drew love out in hieroglyphics,
carved constellations into the page,
I think I first learned to make pain sound beautiful when I took your broken fragments and built a church with my bare palms,
I think it was around the time
I picked up the pen,
so I haven’t picked one up since.
they always say it’s such a shame,
but love to me is a shattered domain,
and this world is still ill prepared to swallow the pain.
decoding my feelings,
I’ve spent a lifetime baptized in shame.

I choose paper,
specifically the paper that declared my parents love,
and the one 12 years later that made the former a will that left me in possession of a starless sky,
an enigma, but still I never asked why.
left me in possession of all these matches,
with nothing to burn but my own flesh,
from what I’ve learned from love, I wouldn’t expect anything less.
there isn’t a map on the surface of this earth that could tell you where love lives in this body,
and if there was I’d use it as a my weapon in this game.
strike a match to its skin,
so even if there was,
you’d never be able to find it again.
put its ashes in a frame,
trust me,
no pair of scissors will ever damage your life quite the same.

I choose paper,
specifically the anatomy of every card sent to me with love,
because each one was as empty as the wine bottles in my closet,
each name signed marks a grave where I buried a part of me,
nailed myself to the cross,
just so other people could find meaning in my pain.
oh to be a saviour for the shattered,
still over and over again,
I found my heart slain.
I still don’t understand what there was to gain,
told that story on a 8.5x11 sheet,
and I’ve never seen a rock carry the same amount of defeat.

rock, paper, scissors
I explain this game resembles my insides, broken at its core.
rock, paper, scissors
like clockwork,my opponent heads for the door.
rock, paper, scissors,
don’t worry, from my eyes, you’ll never catch a drop pour.
I told you,
I’ve lost this game one too many times before.

i've been trying to find the words,
in liquor bottles;
but the answer has never been at the bottom,
i fall asleep with my mind tangled in my hands,
and i awake day after day,
the sun is becoming more and more of a stranger to my flesh,
i'm running out of space for all these empty bottles,
i've considered filling them with my tears,
and giving them to you as a gift,
so you could baptize yourself in my sadness,
or get drunk on my misery's condensation,
because at this point,
i think there is more alcohol in my body than water,
my tears will taste like tequila and fermented heartbreak against your tongue,
but that burn will never hold a candle to the burn i have been feeling electrifying throughout me for weeks.

i've been trying to find the words
in white lines,
but what good is being high when all it does these days is remind you how low hell really is.
everything is starting to look like an emergency exit,
i see death in everything around me,
they say depression can be a superpower if you let it,
i don't consider transforming everything around me into a mechanism for self destruction,
to be a superpower.
i have never been afraid of heights,
i have always embraced being as far away from hell as possible,
but now i feel like i have swallowed it,
no matter how high i am,
everything around me is still burning,
and my veins are gasoline pipelines,
I feel like I am inches from my body becoming an island swallowed by a volcano,
that ant who fell victim to children experimenting with matches,
was that where you first discovered how to make something feel small?
how to make someone feel small.

i've been trying to find the words,
but i don't have them.
it is shameful what you have made out of love,
you have hypnotized me to believe that love has a numbing effect,
that it is crying yourself to sleep,
that it is uncertainty.
I have come to associate being in love with being in pain,
because when you tell me you love me,
i feel like my body is a house of cards,
and your voice - a hurricane.
what you have done to me is not beautiful,
no sentence that i will ever release from my lips will ever be as strong as the earthquake i feel when you touch me,
i can't navigate between the sky and the ground with your eyes clenched to my skin ,
my heartbeat becomes as flat as the horizon line.
there is nothing beautiful about how you have ridden my days of sunlight,
and my nights of stars, ,
i've been living in darkness for months,
probably because everyday since that night i feel like I'm paying rent to live in a stranger's shadow with my self-respect.

i don't have the words;
you have numbed the best parts of me,
made me believe that feeling is a privilege.
what a shame,
that when you tell me you love me i am haunted by the fear that you actually do.

I have always said I hate liars,
it's probably not a coincidence that I also hate myself,
they say lying is a sin,
to me,
it is a language I heard spoken so often in my home,
I have become fluent in it.
No, I am not afraid of going to hell,
I've been paying rent to live there with the quarters from the lying jar my parents started the first time I learned that my mouth is a weapon,
it's not much of a home,
but who am I to tell anyone what a home is,
the last ten years,
there is not one single place I have felt comfortable existing in,
that statement includes my own flesh,
So when I tell you that I've been living there,
I mean to tell you that my body has become a forest fire,
That the only difference between me and the Amazon rain forest,
is I did this to myself,
that humanity will not suffer in my absence,
I am down to my last acre,
I am coughing up the ashes of every person I have hurt by only using my tongue,
it is not a talent I take pride in,
it is a self-defense mechanism,
I want to believe that if a snake knew it's venom would **** you, it wouldn't bite,
that if a lion knew how your mother looked at you when you were  first born, it wouldn't feed on your flesh,
but animals act in ways that they have been taught to survive,
there's a difference between me and a lion,
I have seen the way my mother looks at her child,
the child who wasn't an addict,
so when my tongue becomes a weapon and tells her I'm sober again,
and my insides are swallowed by flames,
the only difference between my tongue and a gun,
is the intentions I have are not to cause harm,
if that was the case I would simply tell the truth,
tell me is lying a sin,
if the only reason I did it was so that no one else has to choke on the smoke of the fire I started?

i will never look you in the eyes,
because when our eyes lock,
i will flinch,
like a nervous tick,
my eyes will bounce back to the ground faster than a loose bullet.
i've participated in a war like this before,
i just came home from the last one,
nervous tremors vibrate against my insides still,
i can't do this again.
i will always be the first person to pull away,
my embrace will always feel like two negatively charged magnets pressed against each other,
you will always feel like part of me is pulling away,
no matter how firmly my body is against yours
because i am,
because to be close is also to place my heart within your reach,
to place my neck in between your palms,
the bruises had just faded from the surface of my skin.
i will not do this again.
but he places his hands on me and for the first time,
i don't want to pull away,
for the first time,
i yearn for my body to collapse into his,
like two pages of a closed book,
like the sun into the horizon line.
and when he looks at me,
i hesitate to look away.
to look at him is to see sanctuary in a war zone,
i still look away,
because for all i know this is just another mirage,
another illusion of a sea
by a soul dehydrated of love,
i don't yearn to go home after this war,
i am home.
i've done it again.

they say that after awhile,
words start to lose their meaning.
"i love you"
"i'm sorry"
"i'm sober."

you told us that you've been sober for four years,
and that statement was more empty than the glass bottles in your closet.
more empty,
than the pill bottles in my dresser drawer.

my mom never looks me in the eyes,
i think it's because if she did it would make her feel like he never left,
she says i'm just like him,
that the reason my body is a tornado on fire circulating around this earth
is because i was genetically predisposed to disaster.

if only she knew,
that i swallow pills because the line between intoxication and love
becomes as blurry
as his vision after trading places with the bottle,
that i understand the comfort of not being the only thing that's empty at the table.

sometimes my heart feels like it's a volcano,
ready to erupt out of my chest,
like there is lava in my bloodstream.
some days the pills make me feel like i'm playing a game of russian roulette,
except the possibility of death has never been enough for the addict to change.

probably because when they're sober the only thing they want more than to be high is to be dead.
and maybe being farther away from the ground
distracts them from the fact
that they are walking on the surface of their deathbeds.

and no, i am not scared to die,
i am scared that i will live long enough to follow his legacy,
that the only time i will ever feel love is when my body surrenders to the bottle.
that i will only know love as the shadow casted by intoxication.
that one day i will spin out of control,
and set flame to everyone i love.

mom,
"i love you,"
"i'm sorry,"
"i'm sober,"
except she has played this game of two truths and a lie before.

you seem to think that mountains were put on this earth,
to stop my bones from reaching the peak,
because you'd know i'd never climb them,
you knew my soul was a universe and everything around it suffered the wrath of gravity,
that no matter what i'd always be pulled back down,
like the tears of the sky,
like an apple dangling from a tree branch engulfed in the autumn air,
eventually they're bound to fall.
the thing about the rain is that it has to sacrifice falling,
so light can seep through the sky's flesh,
and it does not accept it's defeat after it has trickled into the veins of this earth,
it rushes through it like blood vigorously pumping
in the hearts of passionate lovers making churches out of each other's bodies for the first time.
and the fruit of the earth becomes embedded in the grass,
and makes love with the sky's tears,
so someday the stars can look back and realize their sadness was worth it because the trees stand with the spines of soldiers,
and bear fruit that cause our tongues to make numbness an urban legend.
there is nothing weak about falling,
it is the test of life's resilience,
may the puddles in the sidewalks of this earth always remind you that even the sky cries too,
and may your tongue's ****** from the flesh of this earth's fruit always remind you of the beauty in falling,