When I talk about suicide it isn't for attention,
this is not my exit sign, no easy way out.
This is me seeing sky for the first time after minutes of drowning,
this is survival mode kicking in,
a need to taste the air again with water filled lungs.
A feeling so familiar to me,
it is the closest thing I know to home.

I wear trinkets around my neck,
memories of all the reasons I cannot leave yet.
My necklace holds the smile of a young boy who knows exactly what I need and how to get a laugh from my lips without words.
On the same chain lies the spirit of a girl who with heartfelt conversation and the conviction of God reminded me what life tasted like.
I keep these things close to my heart,
praying to always be reminded of what good life holds.

But so easily do we forget, and how often we are forgotten.
Some days I worry that my reasons could never be enough.

I'm staring down the barrel of a loaded gun,
and the weapon strangely looks a lot like my two hands.
There is sunshine on one shoulder, a cyanide pill strapped to the other.
Now I don't know which one sounds more beautiful,
but a blind decision could make it my last.

My brother brushes past me in the kitchen.
I find myself offended, not for his rudeness nor the brash way he attempts to apologize.
But because on my own flesh and blood I smell him.
It has been years but the odor of his cologne still sends me spiraling.

Memory is a haunting thing.

How am I supposed to move on when every wide eyed, bro-tank wearing beef cake smells like my worst nightmare,
It feels like I am just trying to escape,
but was forced into Stockholm's syndrome via perfumed air and this sense of helplessness that I cannot bear.

This is what it feels like to drown all over again,
but this time I am perpetually a scared 14 year old girl, and it is arms surrounding me not lake water.
I could find irony in using that brand of cologne to light myself on fire,
or to inhale the aerosol into my already full lungs for a short high
Either way it would be the same as killing myself all over again.

Half of me is still on that mattress somewhere,
I don't know how to get her back, or why I want her so bad.
But, how can I make this little girl inside stop crying if I'm not there to comfort her?
How could I ever be there to comfort her?

I am so broken and bruised,
I still flinch when hit in spaces once blackened by hands I thought I knew.

This isn't me anymore.
These limbs, this body, all broken, all useless,
know not of my life nor how I live.
These lungs don't know my breath or the way it sounds to lose it.
I don't want to be reduced to this waste of blood and dust.
The scars across my hips exist to prove myself separate,
If the body bleeds it cannot possibly be mine.

I am goddess, I am infinite,
I exist in the sound of fireworks shooting off long past the 4th of July,
Loud, wild, and constant.
The 4th star from the moon is where my soul lives,
especially on the days that I cannot bear to see this planet's sin.
They forget that I don't belong here.

My teeth are made of sparklers and the fire I speak when angry makes you think me beautiful the way I crackle and glow.
I am cracking, and the dull color of my own demise is stealing the beauty from my skin.
The way they speak to me, like I am eggshell, so white; too pure for this life, leads me to believe that I cannot stay here.

I am fragile and strong all at once; nobody knows which side of me to rely on for fear of being the reason I crumble.
I am crumbling.
I fear that there is no cookie-sweet deliciousness to distract from this decay, yet no one seems to notice me.

I am as trapped as I am free.
Earth the place I can no longer be.
This nonexistent existence is my skeleton key.
Death my locked-door opportunity.

I did not intend this,
A lust for soft hands, lips like rose.
I woke with it already in my veins.
But my love is not my own; they stole my reigns.
After taking what was left of my voice.
It isn't my choice.

Slowly the fear of myself becomes too strong.
Lost in the rhythm of this sapphic song.
I was bred from the blood of a great poetess,
A Greek Goddess who loved both Zeus and Aphrodite ferocious.
Unashamed of the lust in her hips,
Born to a world who saw no difference.

Daughter of Sappho why do you cry?
Please don't lose your life to a lie.
You can do nothing wrong in love,
Pray that Aphrodite is generous from above.
May she show you that true love transcends gender.
Dare Cupid to prove the existence of such splendor.

May the Goddess in your bones,
Find refuge on the beaches of ******,
The people who disagree fear your unknown,
They cannot comprehend the grandiose.
When they demonize you,
Remind them Lucifer was once angel too.

Be too large in love for them,
Do not succumb to their strange,
Better yet prove that you will not be condemned.
Be the catalyst of change.

I fell in love with a girl who decided she could not handle me at my worst.
Because when she was falling apart in my arms it was different,
And when I tried to fall apart it was just terrifying.
I have no space to come undone like that.

But tell me, darling, if it doesn't hurt than do you even love?
Where is the solace if there is no pain?
Can you really be in love if you are not scared of falling?
Does it mean nothing to you at all?

I once told someone that the poison in my veins was too strong,
I am the reason that no one can stay.
Even though I so desperately need someone.
Perhaps I save lives this way.

But it is not my fault you were scared of me,
And I am sorry that you prefer something surface level.
Perhaps that will be your place,
Because I told you I was ocean tides wrapped in skin.
You told me that you loved me anyway.

If my love wasn't what I wrote it to be, neither was yours.

You call yourself a poet to make yourself seem deep.
Sweetie, poets are shallow pools in human shells.
There are no oceans in the heart of a poet.
If you want deep call yourself a musician or artist, never a poet.
There is nothing beautiful about being someone who bleeds unto paper,
attempting to write some sense of the life they live.
Trust me, do not be a poet if you can avoid it.

A poet lives in hell,
just empty space between stanzas.