You don't know what you want
nor know what you'll become;
but in the years that'll drum on
you won't know what you'll have
before it's upped and gone.

Let palms and backs of hands
burn with pain, the wound of the twine.
Keep your kite from landing within the lambs,
break you back, but not your spine.

For your ambition is an anchor
in the deepest of seas;
it'll reel on down through the
breeze, past the knees,
collecting and acclimatising,
running towards your needs.

But only are they realised
when you're down on your luck
struggling to breathe.
No longer are you dynamic and living,
but a soul sat down
quietly remembering.

So keep your kite close
to your heart
and that anchor in the sea,
for no one knows what you'll become,
nor where you'll end up and leave.

This is not a poem
                          a legend,
                                            or myth.

This is my story.
       This is my rescue.
This is my redemption.

This is a young girl who
wore her shame like chains

                                      it never set her free.

Tugging at her clothes
trying to get the tightness to stop mocking her.

Wanting to be any body but herself,
be in any body but her own.

She wore approval like static electricity,
                 she always c
                                   l
                                 u
                                   n
                                  g
                                        to it.

Even if it never came.

She’d scrawl the words

SOME DAY

in black ink down her arms

so when the other kid’s words
       caused her to hang her head
               she’d look down and remember

some day is one day closer.
some day is just one day closer.

She learned to carry herself like a flagpole,
                                                   it’s all she had out there.

Until she met Him.
He who canoed about her arteries and
wrote books about the things she couldn’t see in herself.

He who gave her someday, everyday.

Who showed her how to break the chains of shame.

Who told her the reason her clothes might feel a little too
tight, was because they couldn’t stand to be too far away from her.

She stopped hearing others insults and only felt His love.

His name?

His name is Jesus.

He saved me from myself.

I think we poets know best
that these words inside of us
can either be
anchors
or they can be life vests.

Choose wisely.

Someone else’s life could depend on it.

There’s a girl.
She lives somewhere between Dayton
and the rusty, old tracks of Georgia.
Lips like cinnamon, hips like sugar.
She smells like October but shines like summer.

But underneath,
she’s calloused and bruised.
Surviving off an *****
that only pumps blue,
matching the hues of her arms.
You can read them like a book,
                                          they tell her story.

Her tears could fill the empty
keg her cheating boyfriend drinks from,
as she cries her galactic eyes to sleep.

She awakes, breathes easy,
but stays.

As if to prove she has heart, by letting him break it.
As if to prove he loves her, by letting him break her.

this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about all the ways i've let my father down and
    all the things they wish i was.
  it will be about every grade point i am away from perfect.
it will be about ******* my boyfriend in the backseat
it will be about drinking until i can barely walk
it will be about crying all my makeup off in a stranger's bathroom.
this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about laughing over stupid ****
it will be about late-night confessions to my mother
it will be about my best friend and my favorite socks and my thousands of little things.
it will be about a boy who tastes like green tea and cigarettes.
it will be about all the things i don't ever say out loud and all the things i can't write down anymore because people find the things you write down and then you don't have anything for yourself.
  it will be about the time i made my stepmom cry
  it will be about the person i didn't think i'd be
  it will be about all the paintings i don't finish.
it will be the things i found out about my family at a too-young sort of age
it will be my three without-permission-piercings
it will be the poems (this one) that i'm afraid are too cliche
and it will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.