I smell like abuse,
and you lit a match just to watch me burn.

bubblegum girls do not love lemonhead boys,
yet puckering lips sound oh so sweet,
and sugar does not mix with sour in my
candy land world
but how I wish your tongue to graze mine
against cavity teeth and silver finishing,
and all you want is to chew me up and spit me out,
the way all lemonhead boys do,
but bubblegum girls crave those
stupid, sour boys
and wonder why they spit them out, too.

snow babies wait amongst the white of december,
cradling their iced-over hearts between cold glass panes;
two dozen of us with eyes glued on the outside,
just counting snowflakes and how many shivers run down our spines.
cold bones shatter the way we wait beneath icicles to drop from the roof,
and we know it's roulette,
but we take our chances and bets on the weather,
odds and ends of inches of snow.
to pass the time after angels dressed in white,
and searing cast iron tattoos,
we wait.
you all prefer the other seasons;
not the quiet that comes with ours,
but you too,
will wait to see;
will watch white fall from the sky
because our storm is just beginning.

and you should tell her whose heart you still have
tucked away in the back pocket of your jeans.
and she deserves to know who sold it to you
in the first place for morning kisses
and cold feet in the bed,
because she plants her lips like daisies onto yours at night
and wears knee socks beneath the duvet.
and it's 3 A.M. and you're thinking about taking a drive
and she is fast asleep,
so you take your jeans and your cigarettes
and step on the gas, alone in your Camaro.
and it's still 3 A.M. when you pull into my driveway
and i'm awake, too.
and i say nothing when you unlock the door
and puff clouds through my kitchen.
but i should've known you couldn't remember
if it was my heart
or the nicotine
that you were addicted to,
and yet i padded to where you were,
pulled out your mug from the cabinet
and i thought about how much you traded
when it came to her.

i creep back to you the same way your color floods
into my mind on the grayest of days,
and i cannot block you out no matter how hard
i **** you to hell.
i know i can't stop loving you,
and i try to recede like low tide instead of
swallowing you whole,
but the waves of high tide come and i crave being
engulfed by you.
and i don't want to be a black hole;
all-consuming for something,
for anything.
but in the dark i still find you,
and your bright baby blues,
i will always find you,
perhaps i always will.
maybe because i know your heart beats gold,
and only i see it,
so maybe i am lucky in that sense,
or cursed,
that if your soul turns black,
or vanishes into a colorless hole,
i will still always see your light.

i remember when the trickling sound of rain frightened me; pattering against the windowpane in the dead of night like creaky fingers belonging to my fears.
first, they were the dark, and roller coasters with skittish tracks from old-timey days, and monsters under the bed with long arms waiting to wrap me into them.
those changed, quite how most everything does, into those of melancholy love, and unrequited love, and the constant worry of fairytale endings rattling in my mind until it turned into gunk and spewed out my ears, doing anything i can to get it out, out, out.
my dear, i await the days where there is nothing to be afraid of, though they may not come soon.
we are impatient beings not designed for the way the world works on its own; outside of who we are.
and yes, my fears remain, but no longer am i afraid of the rain.

i’ve become comfortable with the way your ripped t-shirt hangs off my shoulders, and the way your detergent mixes with your cologne,
so you smell like home,
even if i’m not supposed to live there,
or love there,
but constant nights i wish for the older times where you took me into your room; crawling on the twin bed with breath reeking of beer and bad decisions,
but i didn’t want to regret you,
so we kissed cheeks and whispered secrets, and shared gazes i’d never tell to anyone,
for it was ours.
and now i wear my own clothing, yet i yearn for your shirts every time i enter your room,
where you used to whisper down my body,
and trace your fingertips along my waist like butterfly kisses on gentle skin.
and we find ourselves back in that room from time to time, no longer sharing,
no longer having something that’s ours,
but i see you in the familiar light,
against the familiar linen sheets,
and i fall into the comfort that is a dangerous fault,
for it used to be ours; the comfort, and silence, and goofy laughter i’ll hold close,
because you were you, and i was me, and i was yours, and you were mine, and each night was ours.
so promise me to never give away those shirts i once wore to someone else,
i think we will find ourselves back there in that nostalgia,
and find each other in the dark,
with yearning, excited hands,
panting breaths with the need for one another,
where we fall together and fit like lock and key,
though sometimes i wish we weren’t,
and it makes being uncomfortable without you that much worse.
so please keep the door open, we will be back to what we once were,
and i will sleep in your shirts as you whisper “i love you” low enough where you think i cannot hear, but like my heart; my ears, and arms will always be open,
to you,
to the idea of togetherness again,
to everything that’s ours.

while asleep i cannot scream,
even when the darkness haunts me.
my throat is dry and i have lost my voice
of succumbing to silence.
when i wake my voice cracks
only in an effort to let out my shrieks.
and for what else does it say about me?
that in life i am so silenced
that in dreams i cannot scream.

you told me you liked blondes,
so i bleached my hair.

you said you preferred coffee to tea,
so i made espresso every morning.

and you told me you loved me,
but then you found a girl with dark hair,
who actually liked coffee
and didn't love you back.

so you boxed up my heart,
and mailed it to me with no return address,
because you told me i had changed.

and i went back to brunette,
and drank my chamomile with two sugars,
and never opened that box again.

i remember how you hated arithmetic;
the nights spent huddled over assignments,
and in the midst of sleep groaning about numbers i never understood,
i'd like to count how long it would take for you to drift off.
i remember that you have ten fingers,
all of which have once touched me on wintery nights,
all of which have traced down the 65 inches of my body,
and you have two eyes,
the blue that ogled every part of me while in the shower.
and i used to love numbers,
because i could count each time i fall in love with you,
over and over again.
i remember how you'd mumble formulas in your sleep,
and i'd count each breath you'd take,
smiling to myself multiple times in the dark.
and i remember spending the 391 days without you in my life,
and it makes me hate numbers, too.

they say we are made of stardust,
but we have to remember
that that was an entire explosion,
and that we are the product of destruction.

you cut open my core and threw my insides at the walls
with all of your indecencies and heedless galaxies
that i'd try to explore, but you kept closed, and gravity;
my feet on the ground as they should be,
as musicians and stupid poets like me
dedicate promises we're positive don't change how you love.

and i figure you to be my supernova.

this abominable disaster you've caused transformed me into
the ink blots splattered and messy and unconstitutional cracks
in the ceiling that we think to fix but never quite have enough spackle.
and i'm **** at sewing, but you force me to stitch myself back
together for days and weeks until i said,
"i want you out of my life"
even though we both knew i was lying and desperate to feel
something because ****** romantics like me
want hermia and lysander,
not demetrius and helena.

and we can't think without the noise of each other and the
constant loose ends that fray,
and time and time again imissyouimissyouimissyou.

and my silence, your silence is the loudest heartbreak i know,
and beethoven never had these problems because he could feel
and he knew that fire and hearts do not mix,
and neither should deceit,
but pretty boy you tore out my heart with burning hands and kept
it in your back pocket with all the others,
and i never said otherwise because at least i was something to you
even if our hearts beat to different drums,
and explosions,
and cracked ribs that you'd like to take because my heart wasn't enough and you needed pieces of me to make yourself feel whole.

and i wish i was a little more selfish because i'm stuck with a
carcass of my old self and the buzzards don't care of the
shell i am now; made up of frozen sno cones, and your eyes.

i look into the bottom of my plastic cup;
the one stained with lipstick on the rim and beer foam oozing down the sides
and suddenly i don’t hate you as much as i thought i did.
i begin to love you
to want all of you
but i never knew what love really was
because when it was your turn to drink just to feel,
and you had suddenly begun to feel the same as me,
i realized that i definitely never knew what love was.
i just knew what wanting something bad for you truly felt like
and wanting it so bad felt so **** good
and wrong
but also right, in some kind of ****** up way.
and it felt like cheap beer,
and heartbreak,
and nothing past what happened secretly in your room between us
and the ever familiar sheets.
because when the cup is empty
and the keg is tapped
we slowly swim out of our muddied minds
and pry ourselves away from each other’s hot sticky bodies.
and i don’t stay.
i shrug on my clothes and bite my lip
all to not kiss you goodbye
and i leave that room that smells like bad decisions,
and finally know...
finally realize,
drunk love is always deeper than it actually is,
and what it truly is behind my romanticizing heart
is that it’s nothing.
it’s nothing but a few minutes of ecstasy
and you will still feel the same about me when you’re sober.
you will still need a few drinks to feel the way i felt.
so i don’t love you, right?
i drunk love you, and nothing more.
you’ve made that clear.
so my drunk love is a sinking boat,
and here i am again
drowning in my beer.

sleepless nights taunt me in the pitch darkness that mirrors shut eyelids and butterflied lashes,
the same ones we wish upon,
and wish away.
the hours tick on by and i cannot drift;
my mind accompanied by other things than dreams,
and you,
yes, you, too, my sweet.
imagining anything,
everything,
i suppose is unhealthy for a lonely girl like me,
though i wasn't always this way.
when i found you after journeying through the beyond,
the nights were easy,
and i'd never wake in the midst of sweat and fear,
for you were safe.
a lifeboat for saving you kept rowing back to me,
and i'd come close to slipping under the water,
but i always felt your hand,
at the last moment your hand clasping mine.
and when i would open my eyes and throat above the surface
i no longer saw that dark of the night,
i saw you,
in your light you were everything.

my heart does not work in the way that i'd like.
ask me if i am able to love myself,
and the answer will be "no"
even though i know that i should say "yes"
because i am blessed with the life i do have,
though it may at times hurt like cracked, bleeding anything
all just in need of repair.
i have nothing to fix it anymore...
i've used up everything,
and my heart beats abnormally;
beating for those who don't deserve it,
for those who've hurt it-
i still somehow find it racing,
jumping out of my chest just yearning for some other heart,
one that is more stable, and constant.
one that is not held together by thin weaves of thread,
and rusted staples that can't stay clasped shut for much longer.
no,
my heart does not work in the way that i'd like.
it is broken.
it is beaten.
and it is stupid,
but i am still capable of love,
and it may go to the wrong people,
but better wrong than none at all.

i have not felt for some time now,
my barricading skills are better than i’d like to admit,
and i cannot remember the last time i stepped outside of them.
i misunderstand the difference between conquering, and suffering
because in one,
you win,
and in the other,
well,
it is easy to be swarmed with grief.
i wore grief like a badge.
but in both,
to conquer you must suffer first in order to know what you are fighting for.
i have yielded nothing but emptiness in my hands as others swung their daggers and swords
scraping my surface as prologue,
then finally slivering down to my bone as epilogue.
but my story is not over,
my barricades are crumbling stone by stone
and maybe my sun will shine again,
but i am a force to be reckoned with because queens will conquer,
and my legacy is just beginning.