I want to know you so much better than I do. I want to see you wipe sleep from your eyes and I want to see exactly how much sugar you add to your coffee so I can make it for you at 3 AM when we haven't slept in days. I want to know how you got the snake-like scar on your neck and I want to know why you don't talk to your dad anymore, or what your mom always made for dinner on your birthdays. I have to learn where your favorite diner is and the gorey details of your worst nightmare. I want to know what visuals your mind creates when you're on acid and why your brother got kicked out of your house when you were 14 and he was 16. I wish you could let me tear open the stitches holding your heart together so I could crawl in and make myself a nest and truly understand who put them there and why.

You held me like I was glass and you were always afraid of tearing apart the stitches on my heart. You didn't mind when I used menthol and nicotine to glue my bones together, and when I couldn't stop shaking because I was constantly cold, you wrapped me in a blanket like I was a caterpillar going into a cocoon as you brought me coffee so hot it burned the lining of my stomach. Now I know that each and every time you wrapped me in that cocoon you couldn't help but to hold at least a sliver of hope that I was actually a caterpillar and when I emerged I would be a beautiful and perfect creature so we would be able to start new and you wouldn't have to hold a shaking pile of bones, you could hold a real beautiful girl with skin made from oil paint and sunlight with hair spun from flower petals. A girl who wasn't constantly afraid of everything and could use words to tell yoou how she was feeling instead of just shrugging and taking another drag of a cigarette. There's nothing poetic about gluing myself together with smokes and coffee and there's nothing beautiful about being too afraid of the final splat that I don't allow myself to fall for someone as beautiful and sparkling as you. There's nothing beautiful about how choppy my words are and the nights I spend crying on the bathroom floor. You deserve that girl who's skin is ******* oil paint and sunlight. You deserve someone who can pronounce 'I love you' and mean it. You deserve the girl who's blood isn't made of gasoline who's just waiting to blow up everything and everyone when she decides to light a match on her tongue. I don't know what you were thinking at the exact moment you found me lying on the tile floor of the bathroom clawing at my own skin but I think I do know that that was when you finally realized that I'm a lost cause and you know I'm never going to be fixed, just stapled and sewn over the holes I'm made of. I know you figured it out because when I woke up you were gone with all your things except a sticky note that told me I am stuck being a caterpillar forever and you've tried and failed to make me a butterfly so you're running away to find the girl who's hair is spun from flower petals.

The last time you said 'I love you' you breathed it into my mouth and it tasted like gasoline and razor blades. You used to write poetry sititng next to me and I swear the sound of your pen hitting your notebook was my heartbeat. We haven't spoken in twenty-seven days but your words still cut me like butterfly knives. We once went to a butterfly garden and I told you that your words remind me of one, a butterfly; so delicate and beautiful, so different with wings just waiting to take you to better places, more beautiful places. Soon your wings morphed into blades so sharp you couldn't speak without cutting me. I know I have to let you go but your smell is trapped in the molecules of my blankets and you forgot to take back the hat you let me wear the night we smoked on the fire escape after we didn't sleep for days. You've become a part of me. My mom used to tell me to be careful of how I attached myself to people and she warned me to never lose myself to anyone but you snuck into my veins and became my 3 AM coffee and the cigarette I smoke on my 10 minute break from work. I don't know how you snuck into my veins I wanted to listen to my mom but I couldn't help it; the second I saw the colors blending together in your irises I was your's, but you aren't mine and your wings have flown you to better places, more beautiful places with people who you can actually love and I'm here with weights tying my body down using your favorite coffee to try and defrost the frozen veins you left me with.

If you're a gas stove
I want to be propane
I want to fuel you.
And I know I sound pretentious
up here
making a stupid, messy stab
into the heart of poetry.
Forcing it to bleed
an open wound
I don't know how to do this
I don't know how to make you see
these ******* characters
that form words
when words morph into lines
then to stanzas
then a ******* poem.
Just a bunch of broken sentences
but I guess that's why
they say poetry is for broken people
to mend their broken hearts.
Love for the loveless
hope for the hopeless
poems are broken
just like all of us
us broken people with plastered smiles
and Hello-Kitty band-aids
holding together
our shattered hearts.
Such a beautiful art
to be so broken.
Like butterflies
fluttering in the calm breeze.
****.
I've always hated butterflies
and butterfly knives and butterfly band-aids.
So what am I going on about?
As my heart looks to my brain
it whispers softly,
"Shh...I got this."
Well then heart, might I ask you something?
What
The
****
What do you have?
My sanity, that's for sure.
Do you even understand what you're doing to me?
Huh? Do You?
No.
You don't see how when you break free
free of those butterfly band-aids holding you together
you're not fixed
you're still crumbling to ****
taking me down with you.
Because then my body
listens to you and says,
"Oh, I'd better crumble down too!"
STOP!
I don't want to be a ******* poem
full of pretentious *******
I don't want to be a broken sentence
maybe a cracked one.
Because let's be honest
a whole sentence isn't real
nothing is whole
there's always gotta be a crack
or a chip
which is what allows us to break
and to crumble
to become nothing
but charred remnants
we've all been thrown into a pit of fire
as people watch and laugh.
Like we're some sort of freak show!
Perhaps we are.
Put here to entertain.
When I was young,
I was scared of freak shows.
How could that lady bend like that?
Wouldn't that blade cut too deep into that man's esophagus?
Maybe that was the point
we want to feel
our days and nights are full of the same pointless banter.
Becoming so numb to who we are,
we long for a feeling of adrenaline
to corse through our veins
and assure us
we're alive.
You wake up and plaster on your best smile.
What if you don't?
What if you let yourself cry?
Well that, would be feeding yourself to the sharks.
They want to watch you bleed
and taste your pain between their teeth
as you slip down their throat
like you're the sword and they're the man in the freak show.
You're nothing of fear to them.
However
fear pulses through your veins
perhaps that's how you became so numb.
You feared the carnies in the freak show
and the strangers in the street
as their shoulders brushed against your's.
Raised in a bubble
but all bubbles POP
now don't they?
What they don't know
when all those sharks swallow you
is that you were never fixed
your insides are still a pile of broken shards of glass
so you're choked on
spit into the air
not even a ******* shark wants someone so broken.
So tell me now
why is poetry placed on such a high pedestal?
No one loves so broken a man
but they're mystified at the words one can place on paper
in broken sentences
to a ******* stanza
we gawk at the people
who's words flow like rivers
and eyes are nothing but black holes
poetry is supposed to be dark, deep.
But,
when you're truly so numb and empty,
do you have that depth?
I think so
I think that when you have an empty hole where your heart belongs
then you're able to feel the emptiness.
You plunge your hand into your chest
and brush the emptiness between your fingers
just like sifting pink sand at a tropical resort
little pieces of glass mixed in,
eating away at that hand
placing little cuts so you never forget
you're being branded on the outside
branded by the inside.
By the only one you cares
but also the only one who couldn't
give a **** if you live or die;
yourself.
Abandoned by the ones you love
rejection
your papers passed through
and they were slammed
with a big red stamp
reading,
NO.
They turned their backs
as you fell through fire
and met the devious sharks mouths
forever is a hollow word
filled with nothing but the air
they breathe out as
they whisper it into your mouth
the taste filling from them
to you
it seems like a kiss of life.
Giving you a reason to stay
but you notice something...
off
something strange
its like milky,
bittersweet chocolate
seeping into the cracks
in the lungs
you thought
would save you
but they only crack more
under the pressure of the slimy goo
and leave you wondering
your thoughts pounce at you
like a puma hunting prey.
Did they ever even love you?
no.
The bitter symphony of their voice
floods your thoughts
and you know
they never told you the truth
it was all
a trick
for a cliche
masquerade ball.