It smells like liquor on the streets you used to kiss me on at 3 am in our drunken shenanigans. The times we snuck out to adventure in the woods and carved our names into trees bigger than we could fathom. When did ‘I love you’ turn around to mean ‘When it’s convenient’ and when did you free your hand from the tangled knots in my hair and when did you stop kissing me at 3 am with the taste of ***** stained to our tongues.

I remember how your voice sounded in contrast to the radio and how you would hum along to Somewhere Over The Rainbow while you drove and I remember the ******* way you swerved away from a dead raccoon on the street and how your hand got sweaty in mine when you almost missed the sharp turn and I hate remembering and I just want to forget but I can’t. Now you’ve swerved away from me and left me as a dead carcass and I want to reach down my esophagus and pull out my heart but I can’t do that and I hate that you just don’t care and I want to forget you and I want to forget your smell and I just want to ******* forget everything. I don’t want to live like this. I can’t live like this.

You used to tell me how much you loved me while you smoked your ******* cigarette illuminated by the moon and then you’d flick the filter and toss it away and it’s taken me until now to realize that I was just one cigarette in a pack of 20 to you and you let me burn out once you were done and then you just tossed me away.

The first time you told me why you don’t talk to your parents we were in your car driving to nowhere at one in the morning. Your dad was angry and your mom was empty. Your hand was shaking and sweating in mine and if we were holding on any tighter our fingers would have broken. My heart was beating ***** and when you swerved the car to avoid a raccoon we came seconds away from hitting the truck that was coming at us. I couldn’t take my eyes off the silhouette of your face in the light of the moon. I watched the curve of your lips as you spoke of the pain of watching your mother fill her emptiness with gallons of *****, and I saw a single tear streak down your face, you refused to release my hand so it dropped onto your lap. We stopped at the base of a mountain and climbed through trees making our own trails until we reached the top. We ****** as the sun came up and I had never felt more at home than when you wrapped me in your arms.

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.

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.

we used to lay together at the top of a hill stating at the stars and watching planes fly over is. you traced constellations on my skin and knotted flowers into my hair. your touch was lightning and your voice was a razorblade cutting through the still air. you lit a match off my tongue for your cigarette and the smoke was a lethal gas that made my head spin. I saw fireflies dancing when I closed my eyes and I tried to reach out to catch just one for you but my hands were made of knives and the fireflies turned into scorpions and they were stabbing into my bones and I was bleeding gasoline mixed with glitter but you were frozen in a dream and your blood was ice and you couldn't hear me spitting your name into the poisoned air. the clouds were black and red flares were peeking out at me whispering raspy nothing's and my blood was on fire pouring out of the holes the scorpions left me with and the grass was a bed of needles pushing into my back and that's the last thing I remember before waking up in a hospital after they pumped the venom from my stomach.

These words are made of only 26 ******* letters that are just so full of blank spaces and white surroundings and that doesn’t compare to the way your eyes sparkle and your hands dance when you speak and the way your back curves and the goose bumps that covered your body when we sat on a fire escape smoking at 5 am and watching the world wake up. These words are too empty and dulled down by white nothingness for me to describe the way you breathe color and energy or the way your mind rotates around itself in the most beautiful way I’ve ever seen.

I’ve heard that ‘he’s just a boy get over him’ and I’ve heard that there are ‘plenty of fish in the sea’ but it feels like whenever I go to grab another fish I find you, and here I am grasping your fish carcass in my hand and then I fall into the ocean and I’m afraid of the ocean I can’t remember how to swim I can’t remember anything all I remember is the way your skin felt against mine and the way you breathed my name and promised forever but I guess that was a lie because here I am holding your dead fish carcass and drowning in an abyss of ‘other fish in the sea’ and I want to forget it all but part of me is only alive because of those memories of the way your hair fell or how you smelt of stale cigarettes and bitter coffee and maybe I don’t want another fish maybe I want your carcass to grow skin and all the anatomy I can’t even pretend to understand and I want you to breathe my name but instead you left me for a universe I don’t even know exists. So here I am choking on your name for the rest of my life.

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.

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.