The lines that are etched in my skin
don't signify that I'm not right, not okay.
To me, they're a sign that I'm here and alive,
that I lived through a whole new day.

I made a place for myself
in my skin, not some medicine-cabinet shelf.
Yet, you still try to offer me help.

I get it. You're disappointed.
I'm fine. I get your point...
but you still tell me to change my ways.

If I'm suffering madness,
please don't mistake it as sadness,
I've got it all under control.

I'm remarkably glad
for the moments I've had,
I'd never think to trade them away.

So don't look at my skin
and the way that it bruises,
or the cracks that form canyons within.

Please, just look at my soul.
It's under control.
I wear these wounds proudly, I'd say.

Within each of us is all the places we have ever been to, except they are still, and empty, and always too cold, and for now, you pretend to believe them only when you feel exactly like they do.
You wake up again with the rain coloring your windows and you do everything you possibly can to be still and simply hear it.
I listen for you the exact same way.

Even in our slumber when we are too tired to see, the world is ever changing, showing us more and more as we look. In the sidewalk, and the dinners you had at a young age that were filled with people and beautiful china set before your hands (but always without sound) you found all of the ways to be lost and have been looking for a way back home in every person you meet.

Even the rain, the way the world forgives us, the way the world exists in its most innocent form, is only present long enough to remind us that all this place will ask of us is to seek the substance of its composition.
And it sits there falling on your window, as if there is always a place for things.

The world began slowly, step by step, like honey dripping off its comb.
The world began like it knew how it would end.
And on Sundays when your feet brush against the wood floor on your porch, and you sit there peeling oranges with the wind inbetween your fingers,
you find it.

the average human
describes their heartbeat
as a thud-thud or a few
rough pats to the chest.

i fall asleep with my ear
pressed up against your
chest. all i can hear is the
echo of a captain yelling,
"let me sink...let me sink..."
i ask you how you would
describe your heartbeat,
you point to the ship
in the bottle mounted on
your father's bookshelf
& faintly say
"the glass bottle keeps the
ship from sinking, completely
blocking out the captain's wish
to learn how to breathe
underwater because air just
isn't doing its job with keeping
him alive."

your break up letter to me
went a little something like;

"you were built in the fire,
stop acting like you burn in it.
you were never made to be fragile,
you were never made to be my glass."

my plead for you to stay
went a little something like;

(20) Missed Calls

your final goodbye
went a little something like;

a thud thud to the pavement.

& my final goodbye was
cracking open a bottle on your
headstone & standing in the sea
with the water rising up to
my knees, with a small ship in
the palm of my hand, a dunk
underneath the tide & a faint
whisper, *"breathe."

he stands tall,
you get on your knees
& he shoves his gun barrel
between your lips,
he presses it to the
back of your throat &
asks you to look him
in the eyes, says not to
flinch when he pulls
the trigger or even try
to think of a last word
that doesn't end with
the final syllable of his
name. the fingers on his
left hand slide from the
front of your throat to
the back all in one gentle
motion, like this has
happened before. this
is a normal friday night,
this is the place where
all girls who **** like
they're trying to turn
modern architecture into
ruins go to die.