I fell infinitely in love with your voice after a cup of coffee and two menthol cigarettes and I love the way you smell like marijuana and whiskey and you. You look like the best beginnings and I wish I saw you in the stars I watch every night. The stars are tired of me wishing on them, wishing for you. I like the way you look in the morning and the way your eyes are like the clouds when you look at me. You are a supernova. You are like the welcoming warmth of my house in Winter. I'd build castles for you with my bare hands. I want to wake up and just watch you watching me. I want to wrap myself around you and kiss your neck and feel your pulse and write thank you letters to your parents for creating you. I want to whisper your name in the same sentence as ''you're mine''. I want you to agree. I want you to tell me that you're only mine, that you're always mine. I see you as a puzzle just waiting for my clumsy hands to put you together. I think about you every second. For once, it doesn't hurt to love someone this way. For once, I love someone that doesn't hate me for it. I've seen some beautiful things but none of them compare to the way you fall asleep next to me. You're the first person to look at me like I'm some kind of significant human being and I love you endlessly for that. I love you for saving me when everyone else thought I was beyond saving. I'd rather be sat in the passenger seat of your ****** old car with you than be anywhere else in the world. I'd go to the end of the earth with you. You make me feel alive. You make me want to be alive simply so I can hold the perfect image of you in my head. It hurts knowing you can't  see how wonderful you are. I want to make you feel alive. I want to be alive with you.

It's funny how people come and go, how things come and go. We used to sit at the lake and smoke and talk about music and films and we'd laugh and dance and swim. We'd eat cheap food and drink cheap beer and we'd hug and we all loved each other. But things change. People leave. And I can't stop it from happening. I still sit at the lake and smoke and talk about music and films and laugh and dance and swim but you're not here anymore. You aren't the people I loved because we don't all love each other any longer. I still have a place for you inside my heart but you have grown to love man-made, chemical substances that spell out death in the form of powders and pills. It hurts my chest to know that your eyes can no longer embrace the natural beauty of the earth, and you somehow need to drown your vision in poisons. It hurts me to know that the simple act of love and laughter isn't enough for you anymore. I can no longer sit here and watch my best friends **** themselves slowly. I know it was fun at first but it kills me to know that you need these things to be happy. I am not writing this because I hate you, nor am I writing this because I judge you. I am writing this because I love you and I hope by some miracle you see the way your actions have affected me and the others that have to walk away from you. I hope you see the way your actions are affecting yourselves. A few months ago you were the best friends I'd ever had but you have made your choice. I will always love you and care about you but I can not bear to watch you do this to yourselves. I will always be here for you to crawl back to.

do you see me?
when you close your eyes
in the night
do you see me?
do you wish
you could feel me
wrapped around your body
my arms so tight
gently tracing the curve of your spine
with such small fingers
of which yours interwine?
do you need me
at 2am
when you can't sleep
for all the demons you keep
are locked inside your head
and sometimes you wish you were dead?
do you need me
to save your life
by giving you mine?
i'd like to do that for you
because you saved me, too;
from the shattering screams of my mind
that tore apart my insides.
i see you everywhere,
wish i could feel your bones against mine
and i think i saw stars in your ocean eyes
when you looked at me that night.
i was so broken
but i think you hold me together
and when you wrap those arms around me;
if feels like i'm being held by 1000 angels
when in reality
i am being held by just one.

three quarters down a bottle of wine
and i'm drunk again,
i mean i can barely see but
you're still everywhere;
you're always everywhere.
i always try to leave but you're so
******* addictive.
you're like ecstasy, baby
i'm so ******* high on you
so euphoric until
you leave again
but were you ever here in the first place?
i haven't seen you any place
besides my dreams,
year long dreams, it seems;
fabricated by my longing
for your rough touch,
the idea of you
inside me
in more ways than one.
come inside, love,
curl up inside me
let me drown you with longing,
hold you down with my heavy heart;
come inside, love.
stay.

You wanted me to meet you in the ocean but I forgot how to swim and I'm too busy drowning in you. You make me better but I still see everything as tragedy. I still don't think I'm ready to be human with you but I want to try anyway, which is saying a lot considering I don't know how to do anything besides write poetry about you. You tell me I'm special but I think you'll grow to hate that about me. I'll probably always feel safer laying in the grass than in your arms but I want to show you I can do this, I can want you as much as I need you and I need you more than coffee at 6am or cigarettes in the dark and I need you more than I need peace or identity. I always have the desire to ask you to run away with me because I don't want to find myself with anyone but you. Let me find ways to open my heart without scaring you, let me find out how to love you in ways that don't make sense. You make me feel like I'm dreaming and I'd rather not wake up without you. I like us more than I like the silence or distance or longing. I yearn to make sense to you, to be the answer to everything you've ever wondered about. I want to be so much more to you but I can't find the words to tell you. I'm drinking about you again, trying to figure out why you're such a big part of me. I love you and none of this makes sense to me but I don't care. Nothing needs to make sense as long as I have you.

I've been drinking about you
since the last time you kissed me,
because if I don't drink about you
all I can do is think about you.
All I can do is kid myself
that the wine tastes
better than your lips;
at least the hangover hurts less
than loving you does.
But I'm kidding myself
when I start to think
one more drink
might make me forget;
because try as I might
I can't forget you.
Try as I might,
I could never forget you.

Stop.
Stop apologising for him not loving you.
Stop apologising for having
small hands and a loud mouth
and a big heart.
Stop searching for reasons why you're not good enough:
you are more than enough.
Stop expecting apologetic phonecalls
or his car parked outside the front of your house.
He isn't coming back.
You don't want him back.
Girls,
you're so quick to see being a woman
as being weak, used, desperate.
You confuse fragility with weakness;
yes, you are delicate
but you are strong
strong and beautiful
and I promise it will come to you;
I promise that love will come to you.
There will be someone
who is more in love with the fact you woke up next to him
than the fact you fell asleep next to him.
He will love you in ways that fill your lungs
and he will love you because you are you.
There will be someone
that adores your small hands,
someone who considers your loud mouth to be music,
someone that wants to love your big heart.
There will be someone
that considers your body to be valuable art
rather than a mere object.
There will be someone
that doesn't tell people you're *'just friends'.
There will be someone
who is proud to have you.
There will be someone who will love you
the way you want to be loved.
There will be someone who will love you
and cause you to finally love yourself.

I am falling
back to where I used to be
except
you're not going to be there for me.
It hurts
knowing I was in love with an illusion
of what I thought you were,
knowing I am in love with a ghost,
knowing I am in love with someone
who doesn't exist.
It hurts
because I am still seventeen
and you were my friend
and you used me
and I'm still naive enough
to think that maybe you'll call
or maybe
I'll come home one day and see your car
and I'll see you
and you'll tell me it was a mistake
and you'll say you know what you want now
and you'll say you want me,
and you'll say you love me.
I guess I'm just deluded, right?
Stupid,
Psychotic,
Blind.
Let me tell you this:
I never wanted anything but you,
but you never wanted anything
other than my body
which I gave to you.
But it wasn't enough.
I wasn't enough for you.
*******
for making me feel worthless again.
*******
for making me think you were my friend.
*******
for not coming back to me.
I thought you were an angel
sent to save me,
to put me back together again.
I thought you were a masterpiece.
I thought I found God when I kissed you.
I thought that above all,
you would keep me safe,
you would protect me,
you would care about me.
But no,
you broke my ******* heart.
*******
for breaking my heart.

It's funny;
how the fires of desire can
make you do terrible things,
how one sweet kiss can cause
a war inside someone.
I never meant for this to happen
but you let it happen.
I'm not one for trust
but I chose to let you in;
I should have known you'd
drop my heart with your indecisive hands.
I know it wasn't right
to love someone who belonged
to somebody else,
but in the heat of the moment
I lost my mind.
In the heat of my love,
I lost myself.
How could I possibly
think about her
when I had your tongue in my mouth?
How could I possibly
think about her
when you are all I think about?
I know I played a part
in breaking her heart
but you broke mine all on your own.
I keep hearing 'sorry' roll off
your sweet tongue,
keep hearing broken apologies in
your voice;
I just need you to know
your pretty words do not
stitch me back up.
And darling, I wish I could forgive you.
I wish 'sorry' could fix my heart
as easily as it fixed hers.
But 'sorry' falls on deaf ears
when you've heard it all before.
And I've heard it all before.

Since you have left,
I have lost all understanding of the word 'home'.
How sad it is
that I feel lost in my own house,
I feel like a tourist in my hometown.
My love,
I have felt so lost since you've been gone;
I guess that's why you shouldn't make homes
out of human beings.
You are long gone
but still ever haunting.
I still feel the ghost
of your absence
holding me at night;
dead, emotionless arms that feel so empty
even when holding me.
I'm still frantically checking the roads
for you;
my heart aches on the long walks home
when every single car suddenly resembles yours.

I am encompassed by distance
between both you
and myself.

Everything that happens now is falling rain. You're wringing my eyes out as if they were the clouds and I'm not crying for the same reasons any more. I begin to wonder whether you like to be held when you're sad or whether I'm just an ocean keeping you afloat. I'd like to be that but it seems I keep drowning myself in you and I can't see the shore any more. I'm not sure I want to. Don't expect me to be the sun forever. There are times when I am cold and hard to deal with. I woke up this morning and I thought you were there but I think my eyes are tricking me. For example, I see too many colours when I look at you and my vision becomes blurred and all I can hear, smell, taste, touch is you. Everyone wonders why I look at you the way I do but I see more beauty in you than I do in the forest. I sometimes wonder if the stars get sick of me looking up at them and thinking of you. I think I fell in love with the way your arms wrapped around me that morning, or maybe I fell in love with the way you look when you smoke and how jealous I was of the fact that the smoke could occupy your chest so easily whilst I didn't know how to. I don't want to be where you're not. I don't want to be anywhere if I'm not beside your skin. I feel like a ghost until I am with you. You bring me to life as soon as we lock eyes and I'm asking you not to ****** me.

I've been trying to articulate how to tell you how I feel about you in a way that is both unique and makes sense. It seems I get lost in the words as soon as I open my mouth and I close it before uttering 'I love you'. When I look at you it makes my eyes damp and my mouth dry and my heart burn with the fire of one thousand magnificent suns. I become obsessed with the curve of your spine and the way you smile and I silently beg you to stay a while. Every time I look in to your eyes I feel like I'm drowning in the most beautiful way possible. I feel hopeless without you, as if I'm a broken mess once again the second you're gone. You make me whole. It's as if I'm under some kind of spell, in love with your eyes, your skin, your smell. I'm in love with the way you draw circles on my ribs with your fingertips as if you could somehow reach my heart that way. I'm in love with the way you are more interested in opening my heart than anything else. You are like the trees in that you keep me breathing even when I don't want to. I love the way you look on a sunday morning, with your sleep filled eyes and messy hair. It seems that even after all of this, I still don't know how to tell you 'I love you' in a way that is meant just for you. I'm so terrified of rejection. I'm so terrified that you won't love me the way I love you. I know I'm not simple or easy to unravel but I promise I'd love you more than anyone else ever could. I'd love you irrevocably. I'd love you more than anyone smart would choose to love someone. I think I already do. I guess I can't figure out a way to tell you how I feel in a way that makes sense. I guess I'll just have to say 'I love you' and hope it's enough. I love you.

Please do not hate me
when I am cold and reclused and quiet
or when I am crying in to your chest
or when I am screaming at you at 3am.
Do not hate me
when my eyes lose life for a while
and I am distant from you;
all I want to do is come back to you.
Do not hate me
when I am desperate, pathetic and broken;
you are fixing me with your existence.
Do not hate me
when sadness holds me tighter than you do;
I did not ask to be this way.

If you love me
I will be warm and loud and open
and I will fall asleep to the sound your chest makes
and we will dance at 3am.
If you love me
my eyes will be wider and full of life
and I will always, always come back to you.
If you love me
I will be strong and beautiful and alive
because as I said before, you are fixing me with your existence.
If you love me
I will hold you tighter than sadness could ever hold me.

It's just that I need to learn to love myself
before you can love me.

We lay here in the dark; face to face, half asleep, completely alive. There is no sound besides our breathing, nothing exists except our bodies entangled together. Your fingertips knead the bottom of my back and I trace my fingers across the path of your spine. We wait and wait and wait and it happens. Your lips find mine the same moment mine find yours. We become lost in each other, our mouths connecting until we feel our minds, our hearts, our souls connecting. You pull me on top of your body and we hold each other there, continuing to kiss until our lungs are full. Your breathing is heavy and longing and it sounds like music in my ears and I kiss your neck gently as a silent thank you, as a silent 'I love you'. You roll me effortlessly on to my back and you tower over me. You delicately brush the hair out of my face and look at me like I am beautiful and in this moment I feel beautiful. You press your lips to mine once again, a sense of urgency in the way you move, a sense of desperation. You begin gently kissing my throat and I throw my head back and in this moment I know that I have given myself to you and I am yours and it's the best thing that's ever happened to me. In this moment I know that I love you with all I have.

I will use you to inspire me.
I will use you like you used me
except I will use you
to create beauty.
I will write as if my life depends on it
I will write about you
but no longer will I write for you;
I will write for myself, only.
I will become better than you.
I will sing louder
loud enough so that you can hear me
and I hope it hurts your sick little heart.
I will devote my hands to the pen
instead of your body.
I will use my voice to speak;
to speak about what you did to me.
I will use my voice to speak poetry
instead of wasting it on you.
I will chase my demons away
without you.
I spent all this time thinking
I needed you
when I don't need you at all.
I will find revenge
not by causing you pain
but by striving to rise above you
and your *******.
I will be better than you
and you will realise what you walked away from
and you will regret walking away.
One day
you will think of me
and you will hate yourself for letting me go.
You will hate yourself for hurting me
and you will break the way I broke in front of you.
I will find love
and you will never have the courage to feel anything for anyone.
You will tell your friends I'm a '******'
but if loving someone
and caring for someone
makes me a ******;
I guess I like being a ******.
I will use you like you used me
but not for greed;
to inspire me.

Why do you seem so impossible to me? You are the epitome of all the things I should run from, but choose to love instead. You tell me about the magnificence that comes from your touch; tell me your hands are made of God as if I didn't already know. I look at you as all things heavenly, my lips are drenched in wine and yours are dripping with lust. You turn me in to all the things I want so desperately to become; all the things I fear of becoming. You are a mess of a human being but there are parts of me that I see in you, and you hide behind the heartless when in reality you just want someone to knock down the walls of your heart again. I do not want to waste away waiting for you; he who has been waiting for nothing in particular his entire life.

I want to know every inch of you, but even when we are centimetres apart you still appear to be so far away from me. The truth is that you just see me as some kind of divine forbidden fruit, and so you speak in tongues I don't understand and make me feel cheap and easy. It sickens me because I know you are just another to take advantage of my big heart. You want to take little pieces of me but not the whole of me.

Can't you see? I want to carve you in to my bones so I can hold you eternally, I want to inhale you like cigarette smoke and then never exhale again. You have been ******* me for days without even touching me, without even being in the same place as me. I want you and I want to love you but I refuse, I refuse, I refuse -

I will not be drowned again.

- m.k

The way you spoke felt the way hot sand felt between my toes, a kind of painful pleasure that eventually made me run back to the ocean to cool off. You remind me of the ocean too, although not the ones seen in holiday brochures. More like the angry part of the ocean I saw in Spain years ago, rising high and mighty above me, putting me in my place. It even knocked me down, just like you did.

I don't regret knowing you, I just regret loving you. I regret surrounding myself with you and your incapability to love anything other than yourself, your incapability to care about anything that didn't directly involve you. How sad, how unfair that I am left here to drown in self-loathing and you are still out there, still happy, still care-free, still clueless about what you did to me.

I miss something particular about you; not your hands, not your lips, not anything near your skin. I miss the little neurotic pieces of your mind and the way you said my name that night. Most of all, I miss just having someone to talk to. How stupid of me to convince myself you are all I need, only to have you leave like everybody else. It's frightening that even though I am surrounded by people, you're the only person that really exists to me, the only person that made me realise I'm not alone. And God, I am so lonely.

I'm leaving. I'm scattering my soul to the wind in the hope I'll find myself someday. Try to love yourself and next time, fall in love with someone who looks at you as though he can see your soul more than he can see your skin. Stop looking for reasons to die and start searching for reasons to live. You are worth more than what you settle for. You are not alone.

You are bolts
of electrical energy
going through me,
standing beside you
is like standing in front
of a speeding car;
you fill me with adrenaline.
Your face is what I see
when I hear the word 'God',
and I so desperately want to be
some kind of Goddess,
something sacred
to you.
I seem to live in constant daydreams
of you,
constant yearning for you,
sending me in to some heaven of breathlessness
and dare I say it,
love.

How often
I see you in places you have never even been to.
How often
I find you deep inside the chambers
of my heart.

It's midnight and I find myself accidentally thinking about you... a little too much. My hair is in knots and my body is sweating in this heat. It's funny, I can compare this feeling to the way I feel about you tonight. I keep thinking about the way your words somehow represent your cool hands on my burning body, how the way you construct sentences has me too weak to stand. I feel you leaving marks deep under my skin, itches I can not scratch. Somehow, the heat outside feels like you are breathing on my neck and I momentarily feel your hands caressing my face. And then I open my eyes but there you are still, in my head, inside me, clawing through me, finding my heart and trying to find a way inside. Put your hands on me, sew together words that make me feel as though I've been blind my whole life and I have only just seen the light for the first time. Tell me we can exist infinitely together and that not everything has to fall apart. Tell me we can just be here. I just want to be here. With you.

I think I found God somewhere in between your lips and mine. At one point when our mouths connected I poured my entire being in to you and you exhaled in a way that said ''I accept you.'' I looked at your face through the cigarette smoke and I knew then that you are all I need. You do not realise what you do to me. The simple act of your fingertips against my spine makes me shiver endlessly. You hold me close and your lips are on my neck and I tremble and I can't stop. I fall apart in front of you. In that moment I am yours to pull apart and destroy but you don't; you look at me and your eyes embrace me and you let me in and I bury my face in your neck as a silent thank you. You make me feel more than I've ever felt in my life; sometimes I want to cry because my heart feels like it's forcing its way out of my chest to be consumed by you. When you're not here I feel non-existant. I think I have been dead for 17 years and that first kiss brought me to life in ways I didn't think possible. Your voice in my ears is like music composed just for me. You give me so much simply by touching me. The world is swallowing me whole but the moment I am in your arms I'm no longer part of this world. I am in the heaven that is your embrace, a safe haven where I don't feel like my mind is screaming. My mind is quiet when I am with you. My mind is quiet and my heart is loud.

I am the ghost
of a girl you once claimed to love;
my dead hands

reaching,
asking,
begging

for a piece of your soul
to wallow in forever.

There will come a time when you are sick
of trying to understand my mind
and my wrists.

I was never myself when I did this.

If I were part of the ocean
I would be the shallows;
the cold tide that people walk all over

reaching,
asking,
begging

to pull people in
but never getting close enough.

I was never myself when I did that.

I plead,
help me live once again
as something new born and blind;
blind to the atrocities of humanity,
but all seeing to life and love.

Love,
the only thing that could ever constitute
as sacred;
a relentless, chemical energy
that turns you in to a fool in all the right ways.
A substance more intelligent
than any apparent genius.
Oh, how the love

reaches,
asks,
begs

to confine me,
and oh, sweet love;
how I let you fill my lungs.

I was never myself when I was with you.

I’ve held hands with pain,
kissed every frozen fingertip
and I found my worship in ethanol and ash
before I found it in between
your lips and mine.

You changed me in all the worst ways,
causing me to start a war with my skin,
causing me to see my own reflection
as something unrecognisable,
something I never wanted to be.

I was never myself.

I made the mistake of building a home
out of a human being
and he was so riddled with wanderlust;
a nomadic masterpiece who couldn’t stay,
but should’ve stayed.

I’ve never felt so homesick.

I’m tired of tearing away my skin
and revealing the heart inside me
to people that are incapable of loving anything
other than themselves
and their sadness.

I crave for someone
to look at me as though
they can see my soul
more than they can see my skin.
I crave for someone
to see
what I wish to see.

More than anything,
I crave to see me:

*strong,
magnificent,
and beautiful.

i am a mess of the mistakes
others have made;
thoughts of you
and what you did to me
cause me to grind my teeth.
i thought you were an angel
and yes, i mean that metaphorically
but i mean it literally, too.
i was drowning in depression
and you came along to save me
and honestly,
i really thought you'd stay.
but no,
you are the devil's replica
and oh my god you know how to lie
and tempt
and burn.
you found me in a place no map could portray;
dancing with my own darkness
as if the shadows were somehow a comfort
for my delicate little heart to love.
why did you take me away from the dark
just to throw me in to it further?
i wish you'd disappear, somewhere miles away.
i wish you'd go somewhere as cold, empty and isolated as yourself.
i gave you everything
and you left me with nothing,
causing me to start a war with my skin.
do you know how much it hurts
to have to search for countless reasons
as to why you're not good enough?
do you know how much it hurts
to know you're not enough for someone
who is more than enough for you?
i do not love the person
who walked away from me that day
i am in love with the person
i thought you were.
do you know how much that hurts?
i am in love with someone who doesn't even exist!
i've spent weeks wishing you'd come back
but now,
i do not want you back.
you were only in love with the concept of me
and the thought of that makes me sick
to my stomach.
i hope that it
was worth losing me for.
it's clear her skin served you
better than mine ever did.
it's clear her body was more of a masterpiece
than mine ever was.

I think the most beautiful thing on this earth is falling asleep with the person you love. I mean, the world is ugly. But falling asleep with someone? It's like all the **** in the world and in your life slowly falls away, and you're just one person, one beating heart, one set of lungs performing the most innocent act of sleep. That's ******* beautiful. It's strange, but whenever I sleep next to the person I love, I don't dream. And I think that has something to do with him being all of my dreams in the flesh. I fall asleep next to my dream and that's enough for me. I don't need anything else than to fall asleep with him and to wake up next to him. And waking up with him? That's a completely different kind of beautiful. He's all sleepy eyes and messy hair and morning breath and sweat, but he's the most beautiful ******* thing I could possibly wake up to. The way we look at each other in the morning; it's like we're seeing each other for the first time all over again. I fall in love with him all over again every time I look at him. It's scary. Sometimes I feel like I'm going to explode when we're laying together watching a movie, because simply laying in his arms and being with him overwhelms me to the point where I could cry and scream my love for him. And my favourite part is when we fall asleep; because I'm so scared of missing a single moment with him, but so excited to wake up to him again.

She's a small town girl, but she thinks she's made for the big city. You've seen her; walking through the streets, cigarette between her lips and a glint in her eye that says ''you don't know **** about me.'' She's the simple body, simple face, simple voice but she's a disaster just waiting to happen. She's a volcano ready to erupt in the most beautiful way possible.

She looks at you with her eyes giving nothing away, piercing your soul, overpowering your mind with 1000 questions, the first being ''who are you?'' But you don't ask because in all honesty, it's more exciting that way and she has no ******* clue who she is. You wanna know her, right? You want her to open herself up and reveal to you all those sacred parts of her body. You want to explore her skin, feel her bones. You want her to leave a mark on you made of lipstick, you want your sheets to smell like her perfume and you always want more.

She isn't going to give you more.

She's a timebomb, ticking away the more you watch her. It makes her angry. She knows your staring at her *** as she walks away and she's wondering why you still won't look her in the eyes when she talks to you. She might rip her clothes off for you but she's never going to let you behind her skin. It's dark there and sometimes, there isn't a way out... at least for her. She knows you're going to leave and she's waiting. And when you leave, she'll cry for you. She'll cry herself to sleep.

But it's okay, because one day she'll live in the big city. It's okay because she'll find someone else, right? It's okay to treat her like a cheap ******* because one day she'll find someone who doesn't. And all of this pain she feels, all of these tears; they're just temporary. No way could you hurt her permanantly. I mean, she'll get over it, right?

There is ice
on the pavement
and the wind hasn't stopped for a week.

The sky is dim
and polluted
and our cigarettes shine brighter
than the stars do.

You enter
and you are wild flowers
in a town that has only
ever known the colour
grey.

Others are just funeral cars
passing by,
whilst you are full-blown technicolour
in this void.

You look my way
and approach me.
The stars shine
more brightly tonight.