one day someone will love you more than they love the bottom of a bottle. don’t let someone first love you when they’re drunk, because that’s the only time they ever will.

2. just because someone leaves, doesn’t mean they didn’t care, sometimes it means they cared too much.

3. people will come and go in your life. sometimes they’re a sprinkle, and sometimes they’re a storm.


4. you will have your heart broken. maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow. he may not be yours, but he will hurt you in ways you never knew he could.

5. you will find someone who you are too much for. let them go, because you can find someone who will rise to meet your boundlessness.


6. you will find someone who is too much for you. you will love them enough to rise, or you will love them enough to leave.

7. love yourself first, otherwise you’ll never understand the love you deserve.

Please do not fall in love with me.
My love is a loaded gun, lips a trigger, spitting a beautiful vocabulary of bullets.

My love is a bomb. The impact is amplified 10 miles wide and 3 miles deep. The light is blinding, the sound deafening, the radiation illuminating you from the inside out, but it is an unseen illness.

When I shatter your heart, it will be a glimmering glass window busted by a brick, not because you were not a lovely window to look through, but because I am a lost refugee, bitter and broken.

I don't like to hurt people, nor do I want to, but there's only one thing that happens when you get too close to a land mine.

Don't get me wrong, love sounds intricate and amazing, but I am terrified of my own capabilities, and I would rather stop you sooner, when you are that eleventh mile away, just out of reach of my explosion, than have you be inches from the fuse as the seconds tick away.

And I wasn't always this way, I'd like to believe I'd known some kind of love,
But I can't seem to help but feel as though it was my fault.

So I live with this distance between anyone new, because of what I wish I'd admitted after the first;

I didn't dodge all of the blows,
I simply denied that he hit me.

Seeing you looms over me like a storm cloud.
Because as time drags on, the knots in my stomach only get tighter, anticipating your lightning.
The pounding in my head gets louder as your words bounce around in my ears, clashing in the corners of my mind, shaking me like thunder rumbling.
I took four showers today and no matter how hot I made the water, it couldn't out-burn the trails your fingertips left on my skin, and no matter how cold I made the water, it couldn't numb my feelings.
I refuse to look in the mirror because I'm afraid of what I'll see.
I can plug my ears and scream at the top of my lungs, but I can't drown out your voice.
And I can put on perfume, but your smell is in my car from when we last drove together.
I can sleep, but I can't help but feel that something's missing and I know that it's you, your cool drizzle of a midnight rain.
And it's hard to breathe when I think about you. But it went from taking my breath away to knocking the wind out of me.
And I can feel the tears streaming down my cheeks but I don't want to see them because they are white flags of my weakness.
This feels like the first shot of whiskey without a chaser, burning on the way down, settling into a warmth that fills my stomach, but by the end of the night, I am as cold and empty as the overturned glass you left on the counter.
My father says he thinks our house is haunted, but I don't think the house is haunted by ghosts, I think it's the people inside the house that haunt our home. We float in and out of the building like leaves catching the wind, coming and going and never really settling in to stay, always anticipating the next get up and go, because the feeling of home is get up and gone.
The memories that hold us down, we can choose to let go.
So, I will dust the cobwebs from the corners, and open up the blinds.
I will shatter the shot glass and pour out the whiskey.
Despite the haunted house, my father teaches me every day to be more than my memories. To be more than the ghosts that haunt my mind.
I will learn again to be unbroken.
My body is not a battlefield anymore, so I will dig the bullets from the dirt.
I will return scratched up swords to their sheaths.
All weapons back to the armory.
I do not want them.
My body, she has seen bruises.
She has seen cuts and scratches, she has felt waves of nausea that carried her into the night.
She, her. We name the most devastating destructors and most magnificent masterpieces, she.
She is not a cemetery.
She is not a hospital.
She is a sanctuary.
And she is a church.
She is a shelter.
She is refuge from your storms.
Her walls have seen sadness and sorrow, anger and pain, joy and ecstasy.
She is, in the most basic vocabulary,
Home.
From here on out, she will not shake in your storms, and never again, will she be haunted.

My poetry does not shake the floorboards
But it does keep score
Of broken mirrors and slamming doors
Tally marks in finger shaped bruises on forearms
One, two, three, four
Bruises,
You can't see anymore.
The hands that cupped my face,
Kisses meant for my lips,
Given to closed fists,
And found on my cheekbones.
Dead words resurrected with names like Jack and Jim,
Putting me in their place
Six feet underneath his bed, under him.
Till roses grow from between my ribs while wicked thorn bushes pulsate in my veins,
Sugary words reminiscent of candy canes,
Verbally definitive, physically diminutive,
Because sometimes sweet talking gets you a deal.
But **** talking, I’ve decided to heal.
The person I was all those years before,
I don’t care,
I don’t know her anymore.

How do you hold the hand of someone who walks pieces at a time?
With their body far ahead, and their heart far behind?
The chipped nail polish of ticking nerves,
Waiting on the conclusion nobody deserves.

How do you bring life to someone who feels like a graveyard?
With crystal rain on her face, but her eyes appear hard?
The dream from her youth,
Her empty womb’s truth.

How do you console a wounded dove?
Seventeen years young, laugh full of love?
Beholding her future, seems a barren abyss,
Impossibly stolen, that new life she’d’ve kissed.

The day has come, too soon, that her well has run dry,
In hesitance, hope, even though she does cry.
Capture in her, some faith to be found,
Hold her close, give her love, put her on solid ground.

In deepest oceans she swims, flies unbounded sky,
She will never be conquered, she is still yet alive.
But her exhaustion seeks rest, so steady her now,
Hold her close, give her love, put her on solid ground.

Hold all her pieces,
Bring roses to graves,
This dove will heal soon,
But till then keep her safe.