Swimming in honey is impossibly difficult.
Unless you don’t know it’s honey.
In ninth grade I started dating this guy.
I dove into the deep end with him and broke out into a sprint.
It took eight months to reach the other side,
eight months until the sweetness seeped into my teeth,
eight months until I recognized the bitter potential of this swimming pool.
Swimming in honey is impossibly difficult.
Unless you don’t know it’s honey.
My mind has always raced and I never had an issue with it,
up until the moment I was thrown a life raft.
It’s impossible to tell how sticky your situation is when all you’ve ever known is under the nectar.
Swimming in honey is impossibly difficult.
Unless you don’t know it’s honey.
We’ve been friends for so long that’s all I’ve ever thought of you as.
Yet after my thousandth lap you dragged me out of the pool, scraped away the syrup, pointed out to the place I had been for so long and told me
“Honey, I love you.”
Swimming in honey is impossibly difficult.
Unless you don’t know it’s honey.

Knowing your flaws confused my heart
so I only wrote about the things I liked about you.
And when words on a page are screaming good parts,
you forget the bad, and become a fool.

Knowing you had good qualities made my head throb
so I only wrote the things I hated about you.
And when thinking about how hard you made me sob,
I forgot the good, and rewrote what I knew.

Knowing the truth makes my body hurt
so I only write my versions of the people I know.
And when my poems read as if the roles were reversed,
I forget what really happened, as if the truth was always faux.

My poetry journals are history books.
Everything I write fades away
I'm too scared for you to do the same
That's why I won't write about you

I know, from your perspective, how it looks
"I'll write about you", I always say
You call out my lies; I'm to blame
But I'll never write about you

Last time I wrote about my best friend
We stopped talking shortly after
I would never want us to follow that fate
That's why I won't write about you

I'm contradicting what I recommend
I guess if our friendship ends in disaster
And there's a hole in my heart, you-shaped,
It's because I wrote about you.

My room is a mess and so is my life
The clothes on my floor are a metaphor for the
havoc in my head, weighing me in bed.
An endless supply of sweatshirts on my desk chair
remind me of the stress piling up due to
things to do, stuff to complete,
and quite honestly I’m ready to admit defeat.
Perfume bottles gathered and toppled over
they tempt me to try and disguise my chaos--
but I refuse, and then I lose them
so if I ever wanted to try, I can’t.
And instead of doing anything about it,
all I ever do is rant.

Sticks and stones
May break my bones
But words will never hurt me

And if they do
You’d have no clue
They leave no scars in reality

Yet in my head
The words they said
Are spreading like wildfire

When I explain
All my pain
They brush it off as satire

Just to prove
What they do
I paint my arms with scarlet

They say it’s me
But in reality
It’s them that are the artists.

I stand naked in the wake of the mirror,
criticizing everything about the way I appear.
Everything seems just a little off, misplaced maybe,
like a baby did a jigsaw puzzle
shoving pieces that don't belong together.
My small chest superimposed on my thick stomach makes me sick to it
My dimples indented on my cheekbones and not next to my crooked smile are anything but picture perfect
The list goes on and on
I criticize myself about everything under the sun for so long
I run out of things to say.
I wish the ugly parts of me would just go away.
I stare into my own ugly eyes with ugly tears in them and scream internal ugly words until I can't take the ugly hurt, and I cry out:
"I don't want to see my imperfections!"
My wish rattles against the glass.
I blink and gone is my reflection,
then all too quickly I beg for it back.

You shake your head
as if the truth will fall right out of your ears the same way it entered
because you don't want to believe it.
You're so caught up in your own 'opinion' that you can't even open your mind up to the possibility you might be wrong.
You are given facts, statistics, news stories, yet you are unable to listen to reason.

While the straight white male ahead of me shakes his head at the possibility of being privileged,
A mother mourns over the loss of her son, a black man shot by a cop for no reason other than fear of his skin color,
another woman is silenced by her ****** through sharp threats in a dark closet,
my own mind flips back to when my aunt was disowned by most of her family for loving a woman.

Yet you, who can drive past a cop on the highway without breaking  a sweat,
can walk down the street at night alone without breaking a sweat,
can show your parents your lover without breaking a sweat,
think that you aren't any more lucky than the other people I listed prior.
Oh, if you only knew how to open your mind, just slightly, instead of shake the truth out.
Lying to yourself only makes it worse when you realize the truth.