Loneliness.
What is it?
It is a concept we so rarely describe in detail.
We've made up a specific word for it-
Three little syllables-
Just so that we can say it and be done with it,
And escape the contemplation.
But I know my own loneliness cannot be captured,
Cannot be encompassed,
By merely the word.
What is loneliness?
It comes in all shapes and sizes,
A space,
A lack,
That can be big or small,
Sudden or excruciatingly slow,
Sharp or fuzzy at the edges.
Hell,
It can even be comforting.
What is it about loneliness that is so insidious?
Harder to rid yourself of than fear
Or anger
Or even such tricky, barbed things as doubt
Or hope,
That stick.
Loneliness doesn't stick.
It seeps.
Steeps.
You stew in it.
It is beginning to occur to me that I don't believe,
Once one realizes loneliness for the first time,
That one is ever truly rid of it again,
Even for a second.
I think it is a permanence that we as a race refuse to acknowledge most of the time.
Some forms of lonely are fairly benign-
The little tingle on the edges of you, when you are home alone and the house is silent,
And for no apparent reason at all-
No sadness, no fear, no thought that is particularly unpleasant that you must drown out-
You nonetheless feel the compulsion to switch on the television
Even if you won't watch,
Just to break the stillness with a human voice besides your own.
Then there are the darker types, the truly ensnaring ones,
The lonelinesses born of the memory of times when,
Perhaps, you were less lonely,
Or even thought that you had flushed the feeling from your soul entirely.
Loneliness is an otherness,
An alien thing that lives in your heart,
That makes you question whether there is anyone out there who would have you
If they knew
What was on the inside.
There is the type of loneliness that creeps up on you and follows nipping at your heels like a shadow on the pavement as you move through your day,
Reminding you, whispering in your ear that here you felt less alone, and there, and that those places are full now,
Of emptiness,
Because those times have passed and not had the courtesy to clean up their cobwebs-
Memories linger in certain little spots, and collect like dust little pockets of loneliness that grab you all of a sudden,
The way forgotten spiderwebs stick in your hair as you move through an old house.
This type is jarring, disturbing, and
Afterwards I always feel the desperate need to wash away the feeling,
Scrub myself down.
There is the breed of loneliness that is a bit more genteel,
And curls cold at your feet like a well trained dog,
Formal and subtle, but constant,
Watching.
This is the sort that makes you feel just somewhat hunted,
When you try to sit in silence by a fire at night in your living room
And find that you must read a book to drive the stillness from your head.
There is the truly hollow kind,
The kind that has no courtesy whatsoever,
And actually slithers into you, inhabiting your heart and stomach and bones
As you try to fall asleep
With ice.
It is this kind that, if it is strong enough
(and you are weak enough)
For it to remain until morning
Forbids even the smallest human touch-
Every gesture of tenderness from another person
Makes this loneliness increase,
Every embrace, every handshake, every accidental contact of skin
Becomes unbearable,
And the afflicted shies away,
Perpetuating a cycle of vicious disconnection.
They all leave a little something cold, even when they recede,
In the core of you, that won't be dislodged no matter what you try.
Loneliness,
Like a cancer,
Can only be considered in remission,
And never truly cured.
For when given room to prosper even for the space of a second it expands and swallows up your thoughts
Until they whither with frostbite.
I suppose I shouldn't be shocked-
As humans we live side by side, arms linked with
Most of the things that will eventually **** us,
What's one more, cozying up inside our skulls,
Inside our hearts?
We have a partnership-
An entirely human concept-
With all that destroys us.
And so we live with out loneliness, like a second shadow.
What is loneliness?
I am still unsure.
I can only describe what loneliness does,
Not what it is.
*I think that maybe to understand it
Would be to die of it.

Dear Lord,
If you are here to pull my strings and topple me down,
And I truly have no hope against the immensity of your meddling hands,
You can just bet
That I will give you one fantastic fight.
Show me enough times that this life is for me to crumble
And I will make it my constant mission
To be nothing but a pain in your ***.
I will struggle, I will protest, I will rise again every ******* time
Until you cut me off at the knees
And then I'll crawl.
I've got nerve in spades
And don't you doubt it.
Apparently, after all, you put it there.
You yanked out my batteries and thought I'd drone down to a drained-out death
But you forgot to take my nerve back,
The little gritty sharp current that reanimates me,
That spark that means
I would use my last breath to rebel, defiant, against my demise.
You might be the Divine Winner
But I aim to misbehave.
I aim to be the hardest conquest you ever attempt.
Drag me to hell kicking and screaming,
Or heaven, if you prefer-
I'll fight you just the same,
To stay
Right
Here.
...Amen.

There is something about an empty path that calls to you, deep in your heart.
A tiny yearning rears its head and tugs at you,
Tug-tug-tug, growing.
I don’t know quite what it is that makes it so leading,
So enticing,
To stand at the end of a path or a road upon which there is no one else.
Maybe it is the intrepid human desire to explore and be FIRST.
Or maybe it is the insidious one- to be alone.
Either way, there is an undeniable pull to an empty path,
Exquisite and gravitational,
That hums through your bones like a charge.

You have to make your peace with the fact
That some of the most beautiful things you will ever create
Will be made in the names of people who don't even know about them,
And could never come close to appreciating the feeling behind them even if they did.
Your choice as an artist is,
Will you let that make your art less beautiful,
Or will it stand lonely and exquisite, because something in it is only yours?
There is a difference between loving someone and what loving them creates in you.
A person can leave you, can ignore you, can forget you, can misunderstand you.
But the art that you create in their name will never do any of those things.
This is your time to choose
Whether you hold what you create because of love as yours,
Or let someone else own-
And possibly destroy-
Something it's likely they haven't even truly looked at.

Your photo still comes up on my phone sometimes-- do I want to talk to you?
Well of course I do.
But I'm not sure the person I used to talk to so candidly even exists anymore.

I've had a lot of people vanish behind their own eyes,
Victims, lost causes, lost and never found-
Send out the search lights and dredge the lakes:
They aren't coming back home.
I've known a lot of vanished, lonely souls
People who give up the good fight and jump from the bridges of their ribcages
And fall.

And Fall.

They hollow out, shallow and craven,
Just the skin and bones of something that used to be
A universe
But was too afraid.

You don't have to be God's favorite
To dive from heaven.
Not when you carry it within your kindness
Not when your words are light
And your fingers make piano keys ache for them.
You can fall
With your feet on the ground, my friend.
You can cast off grace because
It's just too hard to be
Loved.
You fall
Every time you are cruel
Because
Cruelty doesn't live in you
If you don't give it a home-
I've said it before, you are of the earth,
And the earth is never cruel.
It is brutal, it is wild, it is tumultuous
But it
Is never
Cruel.

When your photo comes up,
I look close,
Although it hurts.
I search your eyes for cowardice.
And maybe I just love you
But I never find any.
I find certainty.
And maybe that is worse.
Maybe the certainty that alone is better
Is more despicable than weakness of character, more damaging than fear.
Maybe fangs, when used to fend off every touch,
Are more foolish
Than tears ever could be.

You say
Get angry.
Well
If I get angrier
It will poison me.
Too loud,
Too much,
Too needy,
Too fragile,
Too raw.
Be quiet,
Be better,
Be reasonable,
Be mature,
Be gracious,
Be
Sorry.
I am so angry that tears do no good.
I am so angry that violence
Does no good.
I am so angry that lungs
Do no good.
If I were to cry enough to match the heat of my rage
I would boil.
If I were to hit as hard as I hurt
I would crack open the earth and crawl inside
Tear out its heart and swallow it
And the pressure of my fury would press it into a pebble.
If I were to scream loud enough to dull my thoughts
The glass would blow out in stabbing shards
From every window and revolving door
And melt in molten pools into the soil.
This body
Is not durable enough
For this soul.
I know it. I have seen.
It is like living in a china doll.
I can break it just by breathing.
How is it that somebody can speak
And a rib snaps?
A decision made
And blood wells?
I am sick
And I cannot tell if my disease is my mind
Or my stupid,
Listless,
Hopelessly inadequate casing.
I burn through it like acid,
And it suffers and complains
And I have grown so **** tired of hearing its
Aches and pains,
Its needs,
Its failings and betrayals.
I have been cruel to it and it has been cruel to me
For we are a poor match
But we are all there is
And all there has ever been
And I beg it to work with me
And it begs me to be different
Just like everybody else does
Just like I
Beg me to be different.
But I'm not.
I am this
And I can't help but think that maybe there is a chance
That I can expand
That I can reach out through these eyes
And touch something.
The world is so delightfully raw
And I can't tell
When I reach for it
If it recoils
Or if I do.
You have told me to be angry.
Has it ever occurred to you
That my vulnerability was learned?
That my weakness was imposed?
That my kindness only exists
Because of how horribly
Horribly angry I am?
If I could emerge from this...thing
I would touch the ground and level every city for a hundred miles
If I could be what I am
I would destroy everything I looked upon
Not through any malice
But through simple release
Because it is my nature, my way.
Earthquakes are not good or evil.
Fire, lightning. They do not discriminate.
They only touch
And things happen.
I could touch
And things would happen.
This body is my restraining order.
My reminder to control myself
My rebuke for my craving to be vast
My constant and insincere apology.
This body and I,
We don't hate one another,
We are just opposites. We are just two things
That destroy each other.
It is so fragile and light
And I watch from inside
Snarling
I watch and people pity me
People abuse me
People underestimate me
People
Force
Me.
I quietly let them condemn me for the covering I wear
Because I know nothing else.
It is an agony, to never be seen.
It is a punishment I have been searching for reasons for.
And yet when the light has touched me, and I have been truth
Whenever I have been witnessed in full
I have been loathed with such vitriolic venom that
My poor little shell quaked
Pale and skittering
My small white hands fluttered like moths immolating themselves in the flames of my heart
Too foolish or too mad
To resist their craving for warmth even when it turns them to ash.
You try it
You try
Taking a risk
When you know that your nine lives are down to one
You try flying
When you've got moth wings and the breath of a phoenix.
There is something
Burning
In here
And I've never wanted anything more than to show it to the world
Except to live
Except to continue
And so I hesitate.
You tell me to be angry.
You don't know what you are speaking to.
I have worn this body not like armor but like glass
And it has carried me like a ticking time bomb
But if I know one thing
And honestly
Just now
I only do
If I know one thing
It is that, like the sun,
Even if I am scalding hot with chaos and held together by fear
Even if I am, after all, untouchable
I will always rise.

I often wonder
Why I can't write a nice little poem.
You know the kind-
A nice, little poem
About the woods,
Or maybe a field.
Perhaps about a butterfly or a cat.
Maybe about hope, or sunshine.
I often wonder
Why no matter how hard I try
To write
Nice
Little
Poems
They grow fangs
And spit the truth like venom.
I can never seem to write to somebody
Without saying precisely how I see them
No matter how unfavorable the view may be.
What I think just....
Spills out, all over the page-
Every theory, every wicked little judgement
(All the more wicked because many of them are accurate.)
Every criticism that I haven't the gall,
The courage,
Or the tactlessness
To say aloud.
Why, tell me,
Can I not quit this nasty business
Of hashing out and knowing in flowing language
Just what I think of the people I love?
And just write a
Nice
Little
Poem.

Roses are grey.
Violets are grey.
I'm a dog.

I'm not smooth.
I cannot ****** you with a look,
For uncertainty steals the set of my lips that would invite yours.
I cannot lead you with my voice,
For huskiness eludes me, as does breath.
I cannot sell you with my body,
For it knows not the boldness I would need.
But with words I can stare you down,
I can make you shiver, unflinchingly,
I can honey the air with longing.
With words I am a new thing,
I am lithe as they are, I am sultry as they are, I am powerful
As they are.
Words are my home. Please come in.

My special talent is courage.
I know it maybe doesn't seem it. I know I sit small. I know talk soft. But courage is my special, special talent. I go for what I want. And sometimes I forget how rare that is. Sometimes I forget that people lay it all on the stage, but not on the table. I wear my scars in art all along my arms not to remind me that I have been hurt but to remind me that I fought for something. Something real. Something worth risking this for.
I live hard. I love hard. I risk, hard. And because of that I go to bed every night knowing that if there is something I want, I mean something I ache for with my whole heart and all the dark parts of my soul, if there is something I crave and I don't have it, I can sleep knowing I have done absolutely everything I can about it.
When I fail, I fail so spectacularly that you could write a play about it. And people would clap. When I fall I hit bottom so hard the echoes could level a city. And I love every moment. Because we aren't here to leave this life unscathed. I have broken so beautifully and so completely that now I am free. Little parts of me have scattered into all the corners of the places I've cried in, and now I find I CAN cry. I can breathe. I can love someone hard enough to run after them down the street, look them in the eyes, and tell them I'll love them until the day I die, even when I know they will turn around and walk away. I carry this beautiful, wild, mad devotion to my heart within me, and it is so dangerous, but it is so worth it. Whether I win or lose, it is so... worth it.
Life will ******* up, and kick you down, and bleed you until you think you have nothing left. But you don't. You only have nothing left if you decide you do. I have every ugly, exquisite moment I ever loved or lost and they fill me with pride. Because, you know, I did something about every, single, one of them. Never have I sat in silence and let my life lead me. Never have I given up and walked away from someone or something that made me feel even a little bit. And I never, ever will. Because I know why I'm here, and it's that.
And because every time I remember how truly, madly brave I am no matter the consequences, I feel nothing but joy.

I never knew a face could be so dear
Until I looked on yours.
The moment I met you I saw cruelty in the perfect lines of it and I knew
That you would turn on me
And you did,
Oh, you did.
And yet I look at you with love.
I look long
As long as I can
And thank you that you chose the stage
To make your life with.
I look at you
And search those glittering eyes for moments of truth,
Truth that only comes when someone else's words lend you the shield of a lie.
Your face, framed by light...
Oh, I loved you like a prayer.
I loved you for your harshness,
Your ugliness,
Your
Exquisite
Rage.
People like you are the reason temples were thought of,
And like the old gods you are sudden and cruel
But your face... that face and the soul beneath it
Which lights it from within with a cold, mesmerizing glow...

When I look at you
I finally understand how men would chisel marble
Until their hands bled
Just to capture the smoothness of a woman's cheek.

Is this another renaissance, or am I just pretending?
Sometimes it takes calamity to force me to expand.
I don't know if I'm ready for a looming final ending,
But this time it feels like it's been such a very long time planned.
If I lose this, if I step away, what will I lean on when the nights are cold?
But could I really stand to love a ghost until I'm old?
Dearest sylph, darling demon,
How much longer can I lay upon an alter,
A willing sacrifice waiting for bitter love to falter?
But you don't, above me waiting for the day when my heartbeat has ceased.
I can't keep feeding you forever. Oh alas for my fool love, the beast.

It's that knotted ball of frustration that lives just behind my sternum
That drives me to do art.
It's like an itch you can't scratch.
It gets excruciating.
And you claw at other things, outside things,
Because you know you can't reach inside your chest and squeeze your heart until it caves in.
It's... sort of like that.
My art is all a release of this maddening...frustration
That I can't get to what I need to really dig out of me
No matter how hard I try.
The tension just builds up and builds up until it's paralyzing,
And then when I can't stand it anymore,
All this creation comes spilling out of me
In a futile
But at least active
Attempt to release whatever's trapped in my soul, rattling the bars.
It never works for long- I never breathe free for more than a second.
But a second
Is better than nothing.
That's why I never have time for anything:
My time needs to be spent
On those seconds.
Getting them,
Repeating them,
Sustaining them.
I need to devote all of my energy to relieving this pressure.
There is no room for anything else.

I always wonder why it is
That seeing someone else's tears
Creates such awe in me.
I want to ease your pain
But I am also
Transfixed by it.

The mask slips
When people cry.
The seams rip
And all of a sudden parts of them
That are never meant to be seen
Writhe in the light,
Raw and agonized and
Beautiful
As hell.
I do mean that- hell.
It is both
Divine and perverse
To witness someone else's pain.
I always hold my breath
As if I could shatter their soul
Just with the knife's edge of my gaze.

When you cry
Most people politely look away
For their own comfort
And tug their disguises closer,
Check their pinnings
Reminded of their fragility
By the gauche display
Of yours.

When you cry
I
Freeze like a photograph
And I see you as a child
I see you as a god
I see you
As a rainstorm reaching its fingers across
All the ugly concrete and glass we build
And getting inside
Underneath
To make the trees bloom.
When you cry
I see you like I see a painting
Hung in a museum so quiet you want to hush your heartbeat
Just to keep the stillness electric.
When you cry
You are so bright that when I glance at you
And look away
I am blind for a moment.

There is something about seeing that loss of control in another person
That one second of utter truth
The brutal, consuming honesty that comes with tears
That reaches inside, for those who dare let it,
And wounds exquisitely.
There is a bare second
When the part of them that recoils from the light
Clasps shriveled hands with the answering piece of you
And both hurt-
To see and to be seen
But that moment
Reminds you that you are alive
And
Why.

If you ever love me,
I am going to hand you all of this poetry.
And I am going to explain every line,
Tell you just what I meant by every word.
So that you know that I was thinking of you.
And if you ever love me,
And I do that,
I know you won't mind if I do.
Because you'll love me
For being the kind of person
Who wrote a bunch of poetry
And never showed you
Until I was sure your heart
Would want to read it.
And for being the person
Who wanted to revisit
And tell you every word
Again
Because it remained true.

When I was seven
I asked my aunt how she knew that there was a god.
She told me
To go wait in the car.

When I was twelve
I asked my teacher
Why so many cultures that never intersected
Thought their gods wanted human blood.
He told me
To go sit at my desk.

When I was fifteen
I asked my peers
If they thought heaven and hell
Were manmade.
They told me
To talk about something else.

Apparently
This is not a world for questions.

But
Last week I asked my friend
If maybe this is hell
And we are being punished
And we fear death because it is our release
And we are not meant to have that until we are broken.
I asked
If maybe instead
This is heaven
And this is the best we will get
And nothing is ever so simple as
Good
Or evil.

But
She told me to stop asking questions
That scared her.

How do I feel?
You all know how I feel!
I've been telling you all this long year
That I'd rather I died
Than spend any more time
Drowning in stale old trite tears.

How do I feel?
I've screamed how I feel.
I tore at my hair, don't you remember?
The days on that stage
When I fell into rage
Eyes wild, screams silent, wounds tender.

How do I feel?
I've told you how I feel.
I've not stopped my pleas since the fall
When the leaves shriveled and fell
I told you I was in hell
I told everyone, everything, all.

How do I feel?
I've sobbed how I feel.
Over tiles and full plates and porcelain.
My words sound so nice
You forget that they're right
Read the truth from my meek little pen.

Am I okay?
You should know what I'll say.
I've been answering you for a lifetime.
If you'd only listen
You wouldn't be missing
The boldfaced italicized signs.

How do I feel?
Angry sad hurt alone
I feel empty and hopeless and ragged.
I feel as I've felt
For a long time without
Love to make the world's edges less jagged.

Just because my worlds lilt
Doesn't mean I don't tilt
Tiptoed over a death dive.
The emptiness calls
And demands that I fall.
How do I feel?
I feel barely alive.

I harbor
A great loneliness in my heart.
It has long plagued me.
It is where all desperation comes from,
All strife,
All fear.
It aches.
But that is not the true problem.
The true problem began when I realized
It could be otherwise,
That people existed every so often
Who could calm my tempestuous heart
And comfort my soul.
Then I began to fear.
Because to be without
Isn't bad
When without is all you know.
But the moment I knew comfort
I was ruined for hardship.
Never again could I swallow it with grace.
Since, I have been searching for a way to tell myself
That comfort will return
When it leaves-
For minutes or for years.
I have found very little to help me do this,
And yet I am improving.
Slowly I am crawling up that mountain.
But oh,
Sometimes it does ache.
Sometimes fear does threaten.
Sometimes I am very, very lonely
Even within comfort.
I am finding my way, slowly,
To loving you right.
To knowing that you can fix every pain I have ever felt
But not requiring you to,
Not cringing in doubt when you are absent.
I will not lose you as I have lost the others
To my need
To my craving for comfort.
I will not let my intrinsic loneliness taint this.
I am sad, today.
I am lonely, today.
And today I will sit with that, and be strong, and understand that you are there
And will be.
I will practice patience and I will not let despair overtake me.
Loneliness is the price of love.
I cannot **** it in me.
I cannot use you to treat it like a disease.
I must accept it,
For you.
For you are more important to me than fear.
Yes,
Yes this is a love poem.
A very strange one
Born from the hollow feeling that threatens sometimes when you aren't around.
I am telling you that I love you more than to demand you chase it away.
I am telling you that I can sit in this and know that although you fix all suffering in me,
When you are not there to do it
That does not mean you make me suffer.
I love you enough
To free you like this, and to trust you
To always return
And unknowingly but perfectly
Heal me.

I can’t promise
I’ll ever get used to you.
When I first walk into a room and you’re there
It hits me hard.
I’m always worried other people will notice.
It’s like someone hit pause on my whole being for a second
And then released me and I’m scrambling to catch up.
I recover quickly, but those first few moments...
I blink in confusion, a little dazzled,
As if by sudden daylight.
And honestly I feel silly for it-
You’d think, after everything we’ve shared
I’d have been able to master that by now
But instead
Every time is like that first time.
Every time, I stumble over my words a bit
And find it hard to look you in the eyes.
Every time, I am a little unraveled by you
And I see your confusion sometimes
And your relief when that moment passes and I am your friend again.
I must seem so strange to you.
Sometimes I worry that you think I don’t trust you
Or that I don’t like you
Or that I’m afraid of you.
But really it’s just that
I don’t think I’ll ever get used to you
As a person
As a part of my life and my world.
I think maybe I’ll always walk in the room and have to catch my breath
When you’re there
Because you’re there.

I guess I just have to hope
It’s a strangeness you can live with.

It is not my lot
To teach her not to be a tyrant.
It is my lot to find ways to love her
As she is
Whether she is kind
Or cruel.

You can lean on me
I won’t break
I will bend like a willow tree
And trail my fingers in the river
And sing how I love you into the dusk
And never
Let you fall.

I think I need a revolution.
Everybody hates running.
I want to live in a little apartment in New York, overlooking a cobblestone street. And when it rains I want to sit by the window with a cup of sweet, hot tea, and watch the glow of the streetlights paint those stones and glance off the bricks of all the walls, and shimmer in the drops. I want to see neon streaks along the cars that slip by, sleek. I want a cat on my lap. I want somebody's warm arms around me, and a soft husky feminine voice asking me why don't I come back to bed, honey? I want to linger for a second, soak up the beauty of my world, because I finally can, because I can finally afford to linger alone somewhere instead of constantly fleeing thoughts and memories that bite like flung razors at my back. I want to pause and admire my entire existence, unhindered by melancholy, because finally my life is not unendurable. I want that chance, for that night. For that moment in the quiet hours of the morning, sitting apart from the world, warm and happy and finally safe, looking at its exquisite presence.
But to get that chance, I must keep running. If I stop, if I let it get me, I will never see that day. And that is why I fill my life with distractions and flee my deepest thoughts when they come upon me. It's why the journals stopped for now, and why I hardly draw anymore, and why I am extremely careful which songs make it to my ears. I'm in a race. And if I win, I will win my safety, my security, my life. But if I lose... I lose even more than that. I lose every moment I spent hoping for any of those things. I have to keep
running.

This last thing.
I have one thing left to hope and work for.
If I do, in fact, lose this last thing...
I will take it as a sign that I need to go.
And I will go far.
Probably across the sea.
I have been saving up every single time I ever wanted to walk away from something, all my life.
Every little time that I wanted to break and just run from whoever was hurting me,
Every time I just wanted to cut my losses and quit something,
I restrained myself, because I knew
I could never run far enough to truly leave it behind, shackled as I was by youth.
I saved them all.
And if I do lose this, I will let it all out, and walk away for the first time.
And when I walk away for the first time, you can bet I will do it spectacularly and completely.
I am not afraid.

Here I am,
A silly little human
On this silly little planet.
And I have these...
These incredible experiences.
I have these earthshattering nights
Gazing into someone's eyes like they're galaxies
With my heart crashing against my ribcage like the tide.
I have these spiritual awakenings,
These end-all blossoming moments of total wonder,
And I could eat the world,
Swallow it.
I could be all of it
And it wouldn't encompass what I feel.
And I'm just this...
This little ant, here,
On a marble
Crawling with millions of other ants
All having experiences all over the place,
And I'm really not that unique at all,
And nobody really cares in the long run,
But god,
Spending a night in your arms rearranged me by the atom.
And that's pretty big
To me.

A choir of wolves
Dwells within my heart.
Can you hear them sing?
They're singing
To you.
Whatever your thoughts on the matter
Whatever your hesitations and limitations
Something in me is for you
And I know you know it
And I know you need it
And I hope
You listen
Because I don't care what you give me or don't, but...
This? This song?
This is yours.
Please take it.
Listen.
Listen, and grow.

I think somewhere along the road to Hell and back, I decided that protecting myself was just not worth it anymore.
Not because I wasn't worth preserving, but because I realized that I would take a beating regardless.
I'd rather live taking every chance I can to be happy, and embracing those chances that work out with the passion of the dying, than
Pull my punches, hide my feelings, and end up with regrets.
Because, the secret you learn when you finally hit bottom,
When you get your choice to continue existing or give up?
We are all dying.
Quickly and slowly, we are all hourglasses glued to the table.
We have a set amount of time, slipping away second by second.
What we do with it makes us who we are.
Whether we realize that it is simply not worth having regrets determines whether on our deathbeds,
Five minutes from now or 90 years,
We smile in remembrance or cry in bitterness.
You can take that trip to Hell. We all can.
I do not believe I am special for having made it, and come back.
I think I have simply done it earlier.
Trying to keep myself from getting hurt? That's just a lost cause if I ever saw one.
And pointless in many many ways.
I am aiming to make my hurt mean something. To make it count.
To make it worth the joy I get from never ever ever holding back.
It's just not worth it to me to hide behind pride or fear.
I've been there, near the end, and I know how much it *****.
But there is always a choice.
And those who risk everything for love are strong enough to make it,
Even when life brings them to lose all of it and stand at the decision between continuing and ceasing.
The gift of pain like that is that we find that there is something to continue for.

I only want you to know who I am.
I don't know why.
It shouldn't matter.
But it's hardwired in, a biological need
To explain myself.
You won't read my poetry
Because you don't want to see my pain.
You won't see the movies or read the books
That change my life.
You don't pay attention
To what my art is saying.
And yet you want me close.
Read one.
Just read
ONE.
You want me close.
I am giving you
CLOSE.
You are the one
Backing away.

Here in the dark with the music all around me like water, am I a tragedy?
If I walked and kept walking, would I shed what has happened to me?
Am I repulsed as I used to be, by my past and my helplessness, or is this what healing feels like?
Not the presence of joy, but the absence of pain?
We can never go back.
Like a crystal vase shattered on the floor, wholeness just isn't possible the way it used to be.
We can never regain innocence we lose.
I can't tell if I still mourn it, or if I just recognize the space it used to fill.
What will fill it now?
And yet it doesn't hurt.
Will I end up crumbling like you, darling, in a beautiful melody?
In bittersweetness and chagrin?
In irony?
It is bitter cold outside, and I don't recognize my silhouette in the mirror.
Is what it means to stop being a child simply to exist with losses you never thought you could survive?
Am I old, again, in another way? Too soon, again?
You'd think I'd be used to that by now.
I can stop now, you know.
Stop and think without fear.
I used to be running, running constantly from any moment to remember, from any reminder.
And now I have suddenly found that I can stand stock still,
And I don't know what to do.
I've been running for nearly a year.
How will I unlearn my curses and find a new way to exist?
But...thank you, world, for this chance.
I had stopped hoping,
So many times had I deceived myself that I was whole.
I didn't know that the only way to be okay was to accept that I never will be again.
There is a life in that, you know.
I think, for most people, that that is the difference between childhood and adulthood. The moment when you accept that you will never be innocent again.
The shock always hurts, the ripping pain of having it torn from you by whatever suddenly stripped the last of it away,
But once all the denial and grief and anger and madness has ebbed, you realize that
You have become someone new.

How could you be so cruel to somebody so tender?
You who lord over the world,
Who sprinkle it with cities like constellations and rip the tide from pale shores to dash it upon sheer cliffs a moment after.
You who cry the rain, and lift the sun in your palm to daybreak.
You whose sighs push the clouds and whose anger splits the earth.
You who let your sons demolish one another and run the streets with blood like rivers in the name of all that you are.
YOU, how could you?
How could you break her like a twig, leave her gasping like a minnow tossed ashore, let her be drowned like a moth who has but kissed the pond's mirrored face?
How could you let the wall go up, brick by solid brick, and block the sun to starve her of her light?
How could you watch it happen and do nothing?
Ruler, Lord, Father and Tyrant, I shame you!
Why didn't you protect her? How could you fail to be what we wish you were?
You turned away like she was only dust on the breeze, let her scatter so that she may never find all the little pieces of herself.
What! Did no one pray for her, O Merciful God?
Well I will.
In hatred, of you.
How could you dismantle another life, even as you pull the moon across the sky, unfurl its light like petals?
How could you let her think she deserved it all?
You beast, you failure.
You atrocity.
I am ashamed of you.
Amen.

You don't know it
But we share the armor I built
Against this pain.
We are
Inches away
Separated by paper thin steel
Mirror-plated.
You don't know it
But I defend you
More doggedly than I defend myself.
Because if this thick black mist of anguish
Cuts through to my heart
It's been there
And there is a space for it.
I can mimic the bright world until I am like it again,
With my looking glass skin and eyes,
And nobody will be the wiser.
You don't know it
But I fight for you
So you'll not feel the sting of the shrapnel
Spinning off from my implosions
Daily.
You don't know it
But you've been getting better than my best
Since the day you told me it hurt.
You don't know it
But this IS
The most I can do.
I repair the cracks
Quick and quiet
But sometimes the image remains a little
Warped.
You don't know it
But this is
The smoothest course there is.

It was time.
It was time, and so I read every one of your poems and
Cried.
They were different tears from last time.
Some truer grief fell with these
And they
Were silent.
Silver, like rain reaching its fingers into the soil
Late at night
Ready to grow something
Lovely.
I know you
So much better now.
I loved you- oh, how I loved you
In a complex way
The way that always
Loses me the thing I love.
I shake now, the aftershocks of feeling vibrating my bones
A music too low and too aching
For sound
It murmurs to the earth
And, sleeping beneath the snow, the ground echoes my loss back to me.
I loved you, how I loved you
But I never knew you like I do now.
How you must hate yourself, inside.
People who hate themselves always hate me.
They love me first, and then they loathe me.
If I am lucky, someday they face themselves and forgive me for loving what they hated for so long.
It is all very wearisome and human of them.
Sometimes I see you in the halls.
You refuse to meet my eyes,
As if we were two high school lovers broken up
The week before,
Pretending our lives were not
Altered.
I look at you, though.
I loved you different than that.
There was nothing of owning to it, nothing of flesh,
And so although my heart and mind miss yours
Miss the rise and fall of your low voice,
Miss the thoughts and ideas, so intricate, exquisite
That you would write to me instead of sleeping at night,
To see you doesn't make me angry.
I know seeing me makes you angry.
I see it in your jaw, the way your eyes go dead.
Oh, darling, I know you so well now
So much better than if you'd been kind to me.
Do you forget that as I told you my dreams and my fears
You slowly unveiled your own?
I still feel them, beneath your wax mask of indifference.
They live.
They rule you, as always, more even than before.
They are why
You cannot look at me.
Maybe you loved me. Who knows. And if you did
Who knows how. There are so many ways
To love someone.
There isn't a word for how I loved you.
Now when I dream it is of a little flat with a cat and a curly haired girl in bed beside me
But you never took shape like that in my mind.
You were never a companion, never a lover.
You were never a home for me.
Nor were you a sister, or a friend.
I loved you like I love music, like I love the way rivers surge forward after it has been raining for days, the way I love the sea.
But there was always a difference, I suppose, although I couldn't see it-
For Nature cannot hate. It is, only is,
And my love for you
Was
In much the same way
It was, like a stone is, like the trees are, like the sunlight is.
But you weren't, aren't. You are flesh, and you
Are ruled by feeling and, sometimes, by fear.
I see you now and I know I should hate you
For when you walked away from me
You confirmed every fear I'd ever confided to you.
You took a larger chunk of my soul
Than I had even thought was left, just then,
And I mourned you
Like you had died.
I still remember.
I will always remember.
I sat on Rachel's broken armchair
And I cried for hours
Unable and unwilling to speak.
She stared at me, grief stricken with her own loss
But through it she stared at me as if witnessing a great mountain cave in
Or the sea
Suddenly boil.
She stared and stared, and I shook apart, pieces of me flying into all the dusty corners of that apartment.
I'm sure some are still there, sharp and jagged, ready to cut a foot or tear a hem.
I had thought myself incapable of grief like that anymore
And yet there I was, my soul rejecting itself like a bad transplant.
And yes, I was angry at you, so angry at your cowardice,
So maddened to be left again to try to make sense of a mess somebody else made with no warning
And no
Apology.
Weeks later I asked you why
In a last stand of sudden strength I accused you
And in refusing to tell me you confirmed my suspicions that it was
Your fear and not my wickedness
That lost me your love.
I saw you as such a meld of energies, fierce and delicate all at once
And moons and suns decorated
Some of the most beautiful art I've ever created.
That style died with you. You have the first and last of it.
Sometimes I wonder if you've burned my paintings, or else thrown them away. I don't know. I hope not.
If you ever truly look at me again
You will see that my hands have a white scarlike design of a sun on one thumb and a moon on the other
When I clasp my hands they form a perfect circle.
I couldn't sleep, you see, remembering how you wanted to erase me
Wanted me to erase you.
Everything important in my life leaves a mark
And even if you never speak to me again these hands will make beauty, will spread kindness, will carry loads
And they will bear your mark, for I was so changed by you and your sudden cruelty that for a long time
My own hands looked so... foreign
And would create nothing lovely, nor touch anything gently, nor hold anything fragile.
So much time has passed,
And yet when I saw you again, here, after all the ways my life has changed since then
I knew when you refused to look at me
That you did care
Would always care
Would always hate that you cared
And I gazed at you
Because although I can't say I love you as I did
I would be dishonest to say that I don't. I always will. I always did, really. I chose you. I saw your self loathing and the depth of your beauty and I chose you
To know
And I paid the price I sometimes pay to know people like you.
And I still consider it worth it.
I find I am still partial to your voice
To the lines of your face-
The face I longed to draw, because it reminded me, still does, of some mighty greek heroine.
I still admire how you move, and I still laugh at your jokes when I overhear them, although my face remains unchanged.
Sometimes I am brave enough to search for your gaze,
Sometimes I stumble on it suddenly and it immobilizes us both, and I look away, although I wish I could stare you down and force you to, instead.
Sometimes I think of doing something small and nice for you
Because the desire never really leaves me once I care for someone
But I can never discover something you wouldn't trace back
And I admit I fear your anger.
You told me to leave
And my pride will only let me try so much to give to someone who scorns my kindnesses.
And so there is this odd, unsettled, unresolved feeling I get
Walking these hallways.
I dread and crave
To walk around the corner and see you.
When I do my muscles thrill with fire and ice, ready for a fight, ready for a struggle for my life
And I placidly look your way, force my gaze to slide over you as if you are ordinary.
Know that you are not. That you never will be.
We are so similar, inside.
Reading your poems tonight I cried because I miss your friendship,
But mostly I cried because I understand you
The lost wolf, pretending to be lone
The lonely little girl with fangs.
I understand how much you must loathe yourself, how much feeling you must bury each day to be as you are
And
As all true friends do
I wish you wouldn't.--
I wish you well. I wish you happiness. I wish you all good things. And it makes me sad to see you in the hallways
Because I know that as long as you cannot forgive me for having loved you
You haven't forgiven yourself for being loved.

Because I could not stop for Love,
She kindly stopped for me.
And I collapsed into her arms,
Cured then of being free.

In a golden carriage far we drove
Off cliffs and over rises.
Each time I felt sure that I'd died
But Love never lacks surprises.

And we passed Death along the road,
I waved but he would not reply-
I pounded on the windows gold
But he mutely passed me by.

For Love sat not with me inside
But whipped the horses viciously.
I asked her why and she replied,
"Love means no company."

We passed a church and, out behind,
A graveyard glowing in the dusk,
Two lovers' silhouettes defined
Beside a tombstone, clasped in lust.

We passed a darkened house and there
A lanky boy threw pinging pebbles.
And as the light when on, the air
Was filled with midnight funeral bells.

We passed a first kiss, slow and sweet,
Two schoolgirls shamed but still adoring,
And every time their lips would meet
A raven hoarsely tried to sing.

We passed a man and wife's "I do."
And peering through the stained glass window
Pallbearers paused their work to see
The other face of sorrow.

One thought gloats over all I see,
"When all is said and done,"
I muse in silent reverie,
"Love leaves you quite alone."

Because I could not stop for Love,
She kindly stopped for me.
And I will die my deathless death
For all eternity.

It amazes me how people just...lose each other.
Every day.
Carelessly, as if it's...
Doing the laundry or making lunch.
It absolutely stuns me how people can just adjust to suddenly being cut off from somebody else.
Breakups, the ends of friendships,
They...happen.
To everyone.
To everyone on earth, and I don't understand how people just keep going.
Just live their lives as if they haven't lived them in tandem with another person for...years.
As if they haven't laughed, cried,
Shared secrets and dreams,
Spent countless hours with
This whole incredible other being, who is suddenly just...
Gone.
There's not a word for how I feel, thinking that people just go on, knowing that this person they loved and treasured,
Kissed and connected with,
That this person will grow old and die someday.
How do you face that thought every day?
That they will finish their days somewhere far away, somewhere completely different,
With a family or children that you'll never meet.
With lines on their face that you'll never see touch it gradually.
With stories and joys and traumas that you
Will never hear about.
With memories that you aren't a part of.
And they'll be lost to you. And you just...
You just throw that away, as if it's ordinary.
As if it's... easy.
People just cut their ties so **** carelessly.
Watching them... Mystified doesn't cover it.
Confused. Befuddled. Dismayed. Bewildered...
Betrayed.
There isn't a word. None of these come even close.
Thinking of it, I feel the way I feel when I pass the corpse of an animal on the highway
When I hear about a dear friend whose father has just died,
When I remember how many people on earth starve to death every day.
Me, the sculptor of words,
Always with a way to try and bridge the gap of empathy,
I have no word for it.
For how utterly I do not understand the human ability to
Write off someone you love.
I've tried every single one I know
And none rings as hollow as the feeling of remembering
That people lose each other without dying.
I've turned it over in my mind
Buffeted it with adjectives
Prodded it with metaphors
Trying to find a word that approaches how it feels to realize this
But the only one
I ever end up at is
*"Why?"

Here it all is, in your hands
Every word.
Proof
If you want it
On any sad day of your life
When you feel that nobody cares,
That nobody wants you,
Proof
That somebody does.
You can burn it
Or treasure it.
You can read it like a poetry assignment
Or you can feel it like a first kiss.
But let it be said now
That anything you see here that you find beautiful
Is your reflection
Staring back at you, clear as day,
From a page.

I miss you but it does not hurt me.
It does not hurt me because
You say goodbye well.
The first time, in your car, when I finally kissed you
And I couldn't leave
You said, "No, this is a goodbye kiss."
And you took my face in your hands.
You say goodbye so well, my love.
I call you my love
But you are not mine.
It might be more apt to call me yours
For that is what I mean when I say love-
I mean
Be free and fly
But take me, have me,
Let me belong to you from wherever I am.
I have no desire to possess you
But I crave for you to let me be yours.
I ache for it.
That moment when you kissed me goodbye
You owned me
Not in a punishing way
But in a moment of pure knowledge:
You knew
That there was nowhere else on earth I'd rather be,
No one else on earth whose arms I'd rather be in,
Nothing else on earth I'd rather do than let you kiss me until my head
Spun.
You say goodbye
So well, darling.
That whole night
The last one
Was goodbye and hello
All at once.
I can expect nothing less from you-
You are everything, you are all things that conflict and entangle and war and embrace
You are goodbye and hello
Never and forever
Here and gone-
Unbearably close and unbearably distant.
I am not hurt because you touched me
With love.
I felt it in your fingers, in your lips, in the soft curves of you.
In the way you stopped and asked me if I was okay,
In the way you held my hand and told me not to let the world
Harden me.
I don't intend to. Your touch reminds me why I don't intend to.
You may be many things, my love,
You may even be gone,
But you are not cruel.
And that is so unutterably special to me-
For I have loved cruel people,
Some of the cruelest.
I suffer no delusions that I choose well.
I suffer no delusions
That I choose at all.
But this time...
This time I found you.
And you held my fingers in yours so tenderly.
And you brushed my hair out of my eyes.
And you told me
That you love the way my hands look
And I
Could never be sad
Remembering that.
It was the best goodbye
I ever had.

I saw the earth in your eyes
Every forest
And every ocean
And I faltered, surprised-
As unstoppable and unfathomable
As the deepest water
Constantly changing but always
More powerful, more beautiful, more vast than it seems.
As sacred and peaceful
As the quietest mountainside
Only birdsong and the murmuring of leaves to break the stillness
Sunlight dappling the ground with soft gold
And not a footfall for miles.
As desolate and strange as any desert
Sometimes hot enough to burn
Sometimes cold enough to bite
Harsh and lovely and full of secret life,
The anchor of a sky so large it bows out like a sail
The captor and nurturer of a thousand constellations.
As gentle and close
As the air that turns grasses into waves of color
And whispers to passers-by of springtime as the snow starts to melt
And coaxes dandelions to give up all their wishes
To the sky.
I saw all this and more
And I understood why you feel so out of place.
You belong to this world
And it belongs
To you.
We don’t love this place as we should.
We don’t stand in wonder enough.
We pave over it, we shut it out, we manufacture it
And you
Are the real thing
You belong here like so few people do.
That
I think
Is why you feel so lost.

Hold it back and hold it in, don't pine, foolish girl.
You may be restraining it for a tragically long time, foolish girl.
Learn to keep your passions tight in line, foolish girl.
Learn to hide and bide your eternal time, foolish girl.

It was you who banished your love to the depths, foolish girl.
And it is you who'll pay your heavy leaden debts, foolish girl.
You may writhe in pain and fear until you scream, foolish girl,
But leave your words of love to your cold dreams, foolish girl.

When I hit the ground on my hands and knees,
And my shock turned to pain turned to tears turned to pleas,
And the beat in my chest turned to stutters and seized,
They all said, you deserve better.
I said, "Please."

When I lay there all ******, killed by my own hand
And all of my dreams had dissolved into sand
And I had no wishes, no wants, no yearnings or demands,
They all said, you deserve better.
And I said, "And?"

When I struggled up to my knees, every day another blow,
When I learned that the tears and the blood, they both flow
Much the same when you've nowhere you're fixing to go,
They all said, you deserve better.
And I said, "I know."

When I stood once again riddled hollow with air,
And I tested my pulse but there was nothing there,
And everyone noticed my vacant cold stare,
They said, you deserve better.
I said, "I don't care."

When I met her again and my trussed thoughts were scattered,
And my heartbeat was tripping its new-old pitterpatter,
And my soul was alight once again, if now tattered,
She said, you deserve better.
I said, "Doesn't matter."

They all try to tell me that I'll end up fractured,
That I shouldn't love somebody like her,
That things just can't be the way that they were,
They say, you deserve better.
I say, "I'm sure."
And I think,
*I don't want better. I just want her.