If you ask my about my feelings for him,
I'd reply, "non-existent."
If he ever even asked for me back,
I'd reply, "keep wishing."

But if you asked me where we met,
I'd reply "in Washington D.C."
If you wondered where he asked me out,
I'd describe it to a T.
If you inquired what he got me for Christmas,
I'd recite each and every detail.
And if you questioned where we first kissed,
I'd explain the bench and the park all to scale.

And even though I know it's all over, and all for the best,
It's difficult to let go of what we had, and to put it all to rest.

Don’t tell me things I already know.
Don’t tell me I’m “not like other girls”.
If I was I would have given into your sweet treachery already.
Don’t tell me things I already know.
Don’t waste my time by telling me “you only live once”;
Obviously I knew that because if I thought we got a second chance I probably would have done a lot of insane things already.
Don’t tell me things I already know.
Don’t tell me not to do drugs because you know I’m only human and I’m going to try them when I’m older anyway,
Don’t tell me to stay in school because even if I don’t it won’t affect you anyway,
Don’t tell me it’ll be alright because I know it will but I just want to simmer in sadness for a while.
Don’t try to teach me how to ride my bike if I can do it better than you.
Don’t waste my time and yours
opening doors
that I’ve already unlocked.

It’s NOT FAIR.
YOU get to have one.
Someone who watches football games with you
And tells you you’re his baby girl
And retells the story of when you were born
And watches movies with you
And who you can tell things to that no one else will understand.
You get to have a father.
I don’t.
It’s.
Not.
Fair.

"It's harmless water vapor"; sure.
"It won't happen to me"; you know that's a ******* lie.
"I don't do it often"; we'll see how long that lasts.
I can't wait until the feeling of clouds of water vapor pouring over your lips makes you happier than I can.

Don’t tell me my anxiety isn’t real
When I’m standing in an empty hallway listening to the same echo, each time with less appeal
Don’t tell me my depression is fake
When the mirror in that empty hallway paints tears on my face
Don’t tell me I’m okay
When I hire painters to splatter the walls with red because it makes the black go away
Don’t tell me I’m exaggerating
When even the red can’t hide that the whole house is contaminated
The poison seeps in
Deeper and deeper
Sunk into a corner
Someone call the coroner.

Cheesecake only strawberry
Ice cream never sugar free
Candy canes growing on trees
A sweet tooth with endless reprise
We will celebrate your life now as you did each day,
Taking each difficult moment with a pinch of a sweet memory
to make it easier to swallow.
Your glistening smile will be thought of in sorrow,
but also in sugary rememberance of how sweet you were.

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.

It’s for real this time,
I say.
But if it’s for real this time,
Why do I have to convince myself of that every day?
If it’s for real this time,
Why do I get pushed away?
If it’s for real this time,
Why do they never stay?

Sometimes things look better blurry
At least that’s what my mirror told me
When I took my glasses off today.
Sometimes things look better fuzzy
Like right after crying, eyes puffy
Because you didn’t really mean it anyway.
sometimes things look better hazy
The truth becomes a little less weighty
And easier to escape.

One call,
I need to last one call without her.
One call without her screaming,
Incessant pleading,
That I’m better by myself.
I bury her deep, distracting her with nonsense about how
They probably won’t pick up anyway,
It won’t work anyway,
It’s hopeless anyway,
While dialing each number as fast as I can,
Before she comprehends what each number means
Each digit like a deep breath I couldn’t take before,
As I countdown the seconds until my freedom.
She looms closer and closer to the surface in the space between each dialing tone,
Itching at my fingertips to end the call once and for all.
When a voice replaces the silence,
She freezes,
Out of reasons to continue.
The voice on the other end cannot hear my triumphant smile,
only my stutter, as I begin to speak,
Every syllable another benchmark towards victory.

When I hang up the phone, it is not because she told me so.
It is because I won the battle I fought for so long.

We all have little magics.
Maybe you can lick your elbow
Maybe you’ve never broken a bone
Maybe you can tie a perfect bow
Maybe you’ve never cracked your phone
We all have little magics.
Maybe you have thousands of rocks
Or you manage to collect buttons instead
Maybe you take care of 7 or more dogs
Or look good with no hair on your head

Because we all have little magics
Our own unique bag of tricks
Used to secure our own humanity
Our own unique way of defying gravity.

Your brain buzzes around sunflowers and in West Virginian clouds,
Around strings of old guitars and strings of shrimp flavored ramen,
Around calling me pretty and asking me to dance when we’ve just met,
Around your dog and your home and your friends that you love oh so much,
And it mesmerizes me because
I’ve never loved the way someone talks about themselves as much as when you do.

“We both know how you are with reading into things.” Well... yeah.
I’m a ******* poet;
How else am I gonna figure out what to write about?

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.

Sedate me
Medicate me
Feed me pills until you break me

At some point the spinning has to cease
But when it does, who will I be?
When the constant shaking of my leg stops,
Will I be shoved into your box?
Do I exist outside of my habits,
Or does my identity require I have it?
Is there anything left that’s special about me
When I give in to treatment?

How do you think it feels to be held hostage in your own mind?
A cage made of DNA
impossible to escape
being force-fed situations I never want to relive,
or little annoyances shoved down my throat
and repeatedly trigger my gag reflex.
There is no escape
closing my eyes only projects my suffering on the inside of my eyelids,
screaming for help is drowned out by excess noise over the loudspeakers.

I'm not sure which voice is the rational one anymore,
mine or my own.

I think sometimes I miss you.
Rarely, on occasion, because
It’s hard to admit,
But once in a while I miss you a little bit of a whole lot.
When I hear your name in conversation it’s easy to brush off
But harder to bury when I’m alone.
Sometimes I’m prepared to miss you.
But I can’t.
For some reason the timing’s not right,
I can’t will myself to cry,
So I choke it down and switch to internal bleeding for a while.
When I’m ready, I miss you.
When I’m not, I miss missing you.

How come anger is so strong?
Why won’t it just let me move on?
Instead of forgiveness and understanding,
Anger is still standing in my way.
I say that “it’s okay”,
Because being mad and hurt
Only makes it worse.

If I move on,
If I step aside,
Will anger let me by?
Will it let me fly on my own
Without holding me down and
Suffocating me with tears,
With lies going into my ears
and coming out my pen.
I don’t want to love them again,
but that doesn’t mean I have to remain
dripping in anger, hurt, regret
I really want to change my mindset!
But...
          not quite yet.

I can't stand it.
So I sit.
But then the chair begins to itch,
so I stand again, take a step
which feels forward but is in fact
                                                    b
                                              a
                                       c
                               k
                       w
               a
        r
d
but I continue
carefully tiptoeing along
carelessly creating everything wrong
and then the thing I can no longer stand for
is no longer the thing it was before
and all that's left is me
defeated by my own feet
who kept carrying me forward, backward
looking at the footprints, are they forward or backward?
Easy to explain from either side,
harder to claim only from mine.
Guess we'll never really know
cause now I'm sitting right back down
which is just another way of saying:
does it even matter now?

If we were a symphony,
Bach or Tchaikovsky
would have so much trouble
writing you and me.
Obscurity and dissonances,
memories of resonances,
held together by half cadences--
for we know a perfect cadence ends,
and our piece isn't finished yet.
Appoggiaturas to the next beat,
steps and skips short and sweet.
No need to hold fermatas long
we've got more time and more of a song.

She wanted to love her
but didn’t know how.
The static in her head was too loud:
crowded commotion that could crack open her cranium countless times.
Then the clocks start counting
unconsciously unnoticed
no one can tell:
not her, not her.
The warning there but under the radar,
Simple to see and quickly discard,
Unexplored feelings left burned, charred
Piles on piles of invisible scars.
After her head has had enough--
Almost as if it was obvious--
The clocks turn carnivorous,
and break down the barriers she bound around them,
destroying her defenses and leaving her defenseless as they detonate the little love she keeps for herself.
Then, there’s nothing left.