I woke up screaming with no sound, his greasy hands that touched me in my dreams still linger on sensitive skin.
The School parking lot is full of children as clueless as me, the call comes in and my dog is dying. The phone falls into the passenger seat, I pull out to the highway.
As the children of the sun begin to wake, the speed limit increases and the windows stay down. Neil Young yells his poems and I yell my curses, roll punches at whoever’s listening because I don’t know who to blame besides myself.

It’s not just about the dog, mom.
My life only looks good depending on what angle you look at it.
Through the grained mist that makes up this Monday morning the sun shines through and heats up the sand. I let the waves meet my ankles, soaking the ends of my jeans.
Dropping my head, tears slap the shells. Nothing seems to be working and I miss my dog.
But I can’t watch him die.

And just like all things that die around me, I turn away and head to a beach somewhere. To sit in my underwear and bra beneath the shade of a palm tree and shake with sobs.

My nightmare started the second it happened.
It’s been nearly 10 years.
I’ve woken up many times,
but it has never ended.

The back end of daylight shines through the bathroom windows
casting orange shadows over warm water.
Drawing a breath between my lips and the smoke forms in my mouth, tickling my taste buds before it escapes through parted lips out into the the orange where it spins in circles in the light rays.
I’ve been here before, the odd vibration of the same old universe
but this time-
it’s a different feeling. Exhaling into the new day, things are better.
The cigarette carton lays in the trash, razors folden in between paper towels tucked into the corners of the same garbage bag.
I watch them be tossed into the truck and wave to the addiction.
My fingers haven’t touched the back of my throat in weeks,
I’m eating again.

It’s a new day and I live it through the night.

I keep returning to the same place in my life where things remain dull and unmoving.
Sitting on the leather couch and a freebird singing on the radio the roll continues to
burn and I continue to fall into the room where it is quiet.

The sky is the color of fire tonight a flame caught in a mirror the width of a coffin.
He lay beside me and placed a word on the nape of my neck where it melted into
a bead of gas station alcohol.

I place my face against the cool glass of the window the size of your hand so I
can feel once again how it was for you to cradle my cheeks. Beyond the fire sky a
grey dawn lifts the smoke and I ignite.

The world spins slower
and I want
to die more
everyday.

Salty undertones of emotions that rot within me, ignored love triangles discarded into the depths of my mind to be saved when I am reminded of them on my lovers wedding day, although it is not me he is vowing his life too.
I miss the moments between us the loud, soft, noiseless moments of our love written by my quill pen the tips of it bleeding onto the parchment paper. I could write our love story in a hundred poems, but in my voice I can only tell you emotionless how I loved you one day and then did not the next.
I am one for words on paper but the words from my mouth are incomprehensible covered by years of lying and abuse, cocooned by my own psychological reins.
It doesn't make sense but that is how we left one another.
Without notice and unpredictable like the hurricanes that roll in from the warm oceans and obliterate thousands.

If they don’t believe you
they don’t deserve to
be apart of your story.

You shouldn’t have to explain
yourself.