all I can do is keep roaring on.
all I can do is keep shaking floors when I dance.
all I can do is watch my friends dance from the waist up in the car,
all I can do is hold you like I can melt into your chest and hug your heart itself.
all I can do is listen to mad music, music that makes me cry tears tinted red with rage at the injustice of a just god.
all I can do is write alone in my bed, in my room in the right half of Maine,
all I can do is keep living.

do I start wearing black?
Should I care?
should I stop doing things, because nothing feels right to do?

bury me with things people don't think about.
car seat headrests,
factory machines,
closet shelves.

my heart hurts so much. all I can do is write.

all I do is shower.
not so nobody can see me cry,
I don't mind that, when people see that,
the tears fall gracefully and sometimes I even look beautiful.
it's the sound.
so much has happened.
it's like my mind is on a leash,
no matter how far it travels it'll always come back to
that.
I'll sleep with gum in my mouth
I'll put on sad songs,
my heart will hurt,
my eyes will burn,
but it won't change anything, and that feels like
my cardinal sin.

I don't know
I guess what i'm trying to say is--
no, missing you
my eyes dancing around the fact that they want to spill,
writing this
goes against who i'm trying to be.
i lost you. it feels like you died
it hurts to know i cried over you because i can't compete
with your own problems
instead of being able to help them.
and i know i said i was fine
but all day i was pretending
and i know i'm going to keep having to pretend and i think that's a close second to why i feel like my stomach is on it's way out my throat.
you don't love me anymore. you say you do and i know you do
but it's never the way i want to be loved. with anyone
and it makes me even more angry that you know this
and that i'm tearing up in the library right now
and why do i care
so much
that's the other thing, that this will all blow over like a tidal wave
and eventually i won't feel like i swallowed a cruel saltwater  joke
i keep hoping you're joking
but the truth is the truth-- that the colors will never be as bright as yours were before this and we'll never be the same again,
even if you let me hold your hand again, hold my heart in your hand because i already gave you mine and need something to fill this
gaping hole --
well, now it's filled.

holding your hand is the only high i need
holding you is better than
the buttery french toast i missed out on last night
the smell of maple and almost thirty voices of teenagers born from Hollywood,
our skin sleek with after prom,
i carved our initials in the table at dennys
my heart heavy and pink with the feeling of being 17 and
hurtling towards the end of everything,
sitting in the backseat and glowing,
holding you
is the only drug i need,
unicorn hooves and clenched teeth,
fog machines and sweetness immeasurable,
emily dickinson sitting in a diner at midnight,
wishing she was in bed
or somehow closer
to you

arteries laced together through a daisy chain
and brushing fingertips
throughout an assembly room
of shuffling feet
and sniffling,
ventricles, atriums,
tears running down her face at prime muzzle velocity,
veins spell out what none of us can say,
in this silence that feels like it should never be broken--
how are we ever gonna be okay?

dark ultraviolet smoke, haze
the way your own finger pads
graze on the skin of your waist and then lead down to the forty degree angle curve
soft and goosebumped.
The sweet floor,
we're sisters in eye contact when I hug my legs and try to press
the pressure building behind my chest muscles
eyes burning like blue coals and tears fighting,
I re-learn the meaning of bittersweet
as the world crashes down around me
and rose-colored circles are rubbed into my back,
legs and chairs softly shaping me into
a saner form,
whisperings ground me,
and take me back to
the haze,
young and unafraid.