Dear brother
Your heart has been torn
By yet another
Whose arms like spiderwebs
Brought your heart into her mouth
And let her teeth clash into it

Dear brother
I know the feeling
Like you will find no other
But I promise you
That every final paper
Results from many rough drafts

Dear brother
I see the love oozing out of you
Waiting to be shared with another
But learn to use it on yourself first
Please

Dear brother
You are not
someone else's "Other"
You are your own
You are enough

Dear brother
I know you have given up on
Finding another
But for now now we have
Each other

And dear brother
May we both learn
To love again yet another

I am sun-kissed and I glow in the moonlight,
my eyes reflect like water,
and summer makes me speckle and freckle
and I crave rivers and mountains
and other things that make me beautiful.

I am long-legged like the spiders you hate,
my hair is red like roses and smells like springtime,
I am soft in a way you imagine clouds to be
and I no longer fear you or the dark.

I have grown out of sidewalk cracks,
I am a ******* garden and you can't step on me anymore.

I am too tall to be contained and too beautiful to be detained
and I will never again haunt myself with things I couldn't be.

I am too much to be too little and somewhere you always knew it.

So when you talk to me like you think I still love someone who made me believe I was just an ugly girl,
remember that there are flowers growing inside me,
and I washed the taste of your sharp tongue out of my mouth months ago.

I am an ocean with waves and depths and storms and beauty and there is so much to me that you will never get to see.

You were an anchor weighing me down confining me to one stark place of myself,

I am so much more than you ever saw, I finally know this now.

You realized before I did that we would never fit, only collide. We weren't meant for forever.
We were meant for disaster, always.
Somewhere in my bones I knew that we clashed but I couldn't explain why and now I know.
You were red, burning with passion and I was yellow, too optimistic for our own good.
Red and yellow don't match.
they only mix to form orange,
the universal sign for danger
You were a stop sign, the truck that put out the fire in my heart, the low battery light.
I was sunny, Van Gogh's paint, the midway point between go and stop. I was SLOW DOWN I was YIELD I was a sunflower that you somehow managed to crush.
Your flames grew taller than my blooms and when there was nothing left of me to burn, you moved on to a new field of flowers.
Roses this time, pink and young and innocent.
I hope she burns as poetically as I did

sheep at night, (1 a.m.)
(but i always thought that sheep were not the best farm animal to represent insomnia.). eventually sheep turns to old memories, choke down like hard candies. hurts to swallow. or maybe that's just the tears.

(2 a.m.)or bottles of beer on a wall, except i'm
numbering the ones on your floor, shattered. drinking never made you better but it never stopped you from opening another. and another.

(3 a.m.) numbers of leaves on clovers. i picked so many and i found one four-leaf one. i lost it and never found another. is it possible to lose luck as it is to gain it? if that's the case, it explains where you went.

i counted. i have.

i count but i've lost track.