I don't know how to go fast
because if I go fast it's
going to be bad

The bar is existant
but it's still blue
and I'm still crazy
but I HEAR you
and I remember this song
but I hate the melody
so stop frolicking your
voice over my brows
I don't want to look up
and I'll keep my head forward
because my eyes belong on
this side of my face
looking at somebody else,
so hush,
shhhhhhh
I don't care
This is beautiful
and soulful
and I don't care
I don't care
not at all

Go away.

I find it kind of funny
          that everybody thinks I am happy all the time

And it's really kind of funny
          that I find myself happiest when I'm feeling deep about life and events and people
          and that the only way I know how to feel deep about these things
          is through sadness

And I find it really funny
         That everybody thinks of happiness as something so simple
         ' I like this a lot. It makes me happy.'
                    If it's all so simple... then why am I still only happy when I'm crying?

And it's a little funny
          That I love to write about things. It makes me happy.
          But everytime I write a word, everything goes dark, and nobody can really see what I mean.
          and happiness is so simple, but all of my thoughts are so complicated.

And I find it kind of funny
         That the only reason I sat down to write this poem
         Was because it makes me happy, and I'm always looking for ways to be happy.
          But this poem about happiness... is my least favorite thing I have written.

And it really is funny
         That I have realized
          ...
         That I'm only happy when I'm sad.

love: to have a strong liking for, take great pleasure in

I love you and I love french toast too,

Maybe I don't love anything at all.

I'm the sun behind the clouds
when all you know is shade
So as you search for a lamp
to enlighten your darkness
I'll just wait for these clouds to drift away
so you lay on your back
and blades of grass tickle your arms
You imagine shapes in the sky
that try to hide
The rays that make up the shape of a face.

I speak with the silence that listens to the woes of all things,
wishing I could live one day in it's heavy life,
whispering in it's ear, "I want you."
And I wish all this silent liquor could be champagne,
but my hands know I don't deserve that sort of luxury,
and I wish my gambling was done at the races,
rather than at this blurry basement fold-out table,
but my barren heart does not deserve that sort of luxury.

And I know,
Who knows? Who cares?
And I know,
that this is all embarrassing for me.
I know. Who cares?

And now that the air does not hurt my face anymore,
I can't hide under layers of wrapping.
Let me put on a show for you,
even if you miss the whole performance.
Let me prepare a show for you,
so I can hideaway in a spotlight.

We are walking on familiar ground
in an unfamiliar climate.
We have done this before,
and it'll be the same beneath a burning sun.
I know. Who cares?

And I've given up the sky raining lavender,
and I've settled for being a weekend lover,
and I've settled for being only one type of friend.
Oh! darling, tell me if the sky cries purple for you.

I've been holding this knife against your flesh
for some time now, and you've never been able to feel it.
And finally, I put the pressure on the soft side
and was shocked to see that you bleed my type of indigo.

If only we had fallen and scraped our knees on the pavement together
and I could have seen that you're made of invisible indigo,
then I could have seen that our blood was born to bleed brown together.

So leave me be to lie awake,
wishing for sleep.
So leave me be in this shelter
that I thought would be my healer.
So leave it be to collapse on me,
keeping me warm.

And I ask that I get what I want for just this time,
when I know that good things don't happen to those
who believe that guilt is a small price to pay for happiness.

And now I lie awake thinking about all the people I know
that will die someday.
And all the ugly things that make this world beautiful,
And all the ugly toxins making my body and mind feel beautiful,
and how they could **** me someday if they wanted to.

These days I settle for lovers I don't have to love,
these days I know I couldn't if I wanted to.

I always have myself,
I'll never leave
I am my crowd,
now surf me.

I am the master of arts and crafts
I am a creater of everything around me
I'll design the architecture and paint the roads
and I'll erase the clouds with my finger
and I'll mold people of clay and I'll make them linger
and I'll draw thought bubbles above their heads.
I'll write up some thoughts of appreciation
of all things unnoticed and noticed by me
Then I will sit in corners and look and see
this simple world that was created by me
and I'll see beauty in the small things
and my people will too
because I painted their eyes green
and brown
and purple
and blue
I think I'll paint some yellow eyes too.

Tremors are endless
and my heartstrings
play a double-dutch
symphony--
-- Smacking against the pavement.

Remembering that water's in the clouds,
I'm suddenly drenched in their tears.
My head is always in the clouds
sleeping and drowning in all of my drenched fears.

I yearn for my insides to stop embarrassing me eternally
because feelings are so out of season,
and not in the vintage retro cool kind of way.

Everything I compose is a duet
but my shadow, though it can emulate me,
can't embrace me like you can.
My shadow and I can't surrender into each other
like my late partner.

Who am I going to wander with in the frigid rain?
and who am I going to share this hideaway with
that's nested in my frigid brain?

I keep guiding these invisible spectacles in my head
like a ghostly shepherd,
and perform them for my imaginary phantom inamorata
igniting and burning my ethereal phoenix bird.

and so I'll linger here helpless and conquered
longing for someone to hearken my silent
high pitched banshee shriek,
which continues to remain unheard.

Feel like a raindrop in an ocean,
just a teardrop in a dragon's eye.
Just an ant in a sand hill
scurrying from gargantuan shoes and haunting lies

And so I'll hideaway and bide my time
until it's gone and I evaporate
because these great expectations
will forever be far too great.

This is familiar ground I stand on.
This is familiar ground I fall to my knees on.
This is familiar ground I sleep upon.
This is familiar ground I'm buried beneath.

So I'm waiting for someone to say something.
I'm waiting for someone to stop asking me,
"Are you okay, miss?"
as if it makes a difference.

You've fooled me once, you've fooled me twice
you've fooled me thrice
you've fooled me everlastingly.
I'm a dazed and gullible fool.
You're the jester; I just wish the joke was on you.

Forever only a lady
and never anyone's rose to tame.
I long to be the rose just this once, maybe.
Please. Tame me.

So I stuff the holes in my chest with neon lights
and curled up currency and healthy pours
as my viscera seeps out my unhealthy pores
making muddled puddles on these many ***** floors.

and your attention lacerates me like a disembowelment
but my it's my affection that  is the Hari-Kari
while your schizophrenic agenda is the knife.
Together we're a daily ritual suicide.

I never knew we were born to die
because I've been forever blind.
Thought you could be my lucky cricket
until my heart ended up dead on the roadside.

So sing my neglected soul to sleep.
May it rest peacefully in pieces
while my severed heart wanders aimlessly.

I take this blanket of time and pull it over my head
I wrap it around my body
to hold hostage vulnerability
Right now it doesn't help much
because this storm is too ferocious
and this sheet is too thin to contain anything pathological
But as I wait for this thunder to be over
I hope it won't go under without me
So as I pull this blanket of time over my head
and close my eyes and rock and roll
I sing songs and write poems inside my skull
to drown out the noises of cold
With every note and every line
I listen to the noises cry, until I hear them suffer and die
and I know my cries will suffer and die
So as this blanket rests upon my crown
I feel a chilly breeze breathe through its holes
and know the worst is dead
So as I open my eyes, still raining dyes
I squint at the world that has me curled
I stare up at the sky, craning my neck
I watch the clouds leak onto where my eyes leaked
and tears and raindrops leak together
Because I am one with the world
And as we share our pain
I know we share the sun too

Deserving of a whole heart,

Mine has been trampled by the graceful
and punctured by sinking fangs--
        oozing droplets of romanticism.

Giving out bite-sized samples
one-by-one.

Savor it.

My necklace is a rope,
and my pendant-- my boulder heart.
It snaps the nape of of my tired neck
while my knees quiver stubbornly, locked and trembling,
until they give way with my hollow spine.

A paralyzed portrait on the petrified pavement,
people walk all over me,
careful not to step on the cracks that engrave my porcelain corpse,
oozing out rivers into the soles of their soulless feet.

And now with my fragile frame and my heavy heart I wait
for the world to crash down beside me
and the debris from the wreckage to cover me
from the tepid breeze of the storm staring me down.

I'm just a piece of straw
Not in the center of a haystack
But off to the right a little
You're the needle
Everyone tries to find the needle in the haystack
But instead of finding you
I just got poked in the back by your pointy tip
But you didn't notice
Because there's a million more of me
But I see you
Because you stand out
and let me tell you
You're quite sharp

Despite the absence of presence,
I still have knowledge of existence
which will continue to haunt
my dreams---
          Re-runs of memories,
                    moments of nostalgia.

Some things are bigger than
the razor blades
That now seem to cut shallow

****.

I don't deserve

to allow anyone else

to feel undeserving

of me

I'M SORRY FOR APOLOGIZING
I'M SORRY THAT I HAD TO
BUT I WILL FOREVER WEAR
MY APOLOGIES ON THE SLEEVE
OF YOUR STRIPED CARDIGAN

I hear in my head
voices calling my name
Some of them are familiar
But they all say the same
I could plead that I'm insane
but all the same
I hear in my head
voices calling my name
Because I secretly want to be noticed
by nobody and everybody
all at once.

Sometimes I see things
It's a rare occurance
because I don't mean to see them
I mean to look away from something
else.

Sometimes I notice
But only for a split second
but I don't usually remember
until hours later

Today I noticed something
It was a rare occurance
I didn't mean to see them
I meant to look away from something else

Today I noticed
But only for a split second
I didn't remember
until now

Today I shied away
From what was in front of my face
and I noticed from across the room
a pair of eyes
and what a sight they were to see
I wonder if they had seen
the pair of green
looking at their sky.

Life is a foreign language


you can't understand it

you listen to it, dumbstruck

you watch the way the lips curl

you hear the tongue roll on the roof of the mouth

you are confused and frustrated by what's happening around you

However

when surrounded by this language

it slowly becomes familiar

you cannot translate it

but you notice ****** expressions

you feel the mood of the conversation in front of you

you start to recognize certain words

you can speak enough terms to make it through the week

your vocabulary expands, and weeks turn into months

and months turn into years

you begin to coast

ride the waves across the ocean

resting on your back, squinting into the sun

until sand scratches your back

and around you, everybody speaks a common language

a language you have taken in for years

a language you can now speak fluently

a language that suddenly makes sense

because you have become wise in your years

suddenly, everything makes sense.

Not easily hurt,
just easy to hurt.

Not too weak
but it only takes two weeks

I'm never a keeper,
Next time you should keep her

My brain is a train that gets off track
I continue speeding on this rocky terrain
but this train has no end
I forgot to build a caboose
and the gears holding my cars together
are loose
And I see all of this and realize
my train is coming undone

At night my dignity leaves with the sun
as hoodlums come vandalize
my train's frail body
But I realize also
the beauty that now covers up
what's rotting apart
The destruction that molds
my train into a body of art.

I'm in a coal mine of cold minds
Icycles hang from the ceiling
Stalagmytes byte my iyceberg heart
and stalacytes fill in the hole they ate.

It's the karma--
It has me by the neck.
It's alarming--
Screaming in my ears... deafening me.

I like how you feel beneath my skin
itching and tickling my organs
crawling your way up the side of my body
fingernails digging into my muscles with every step
Even though it's uncomfortable
knowing you're there
The fact that I'm aware
makes me content

You think you deserve that pain but you don't*

and yet I still turn the dial
in the shower
to make the water
burn my skin

I love the people when
the people don't love me.

And the worst part is
I have nothing to dress up for anymore
but I keep overflowing my closet
more and more.

There's a cauldron that sits in the basin of my chest
brewing up potions
whether they're poison or medicine
I never know
but I feel it boiling, bubbling slow
either result is magical
black or white
Right now it's as clear as the bubbles it makes
and they're coming out of the holes in my face
They pop in my ears
I blow them out of my mouth
they leak out of my eyes
and make puddles on the ground.

Don't awaken me to my failures
for they're my most dependable friends.
They never forsake me;
my baneful lovers until the end.

They're the sun that blinds me as it hovers
and abandons me in the twilight.
Why is it that the sun will always go down on me
but you never will anymore?

This is my ode to severence
so severe that I will bleed out
if you extract yourself from my chest.
So sleep there and keep me arduously alive.

I've been to every surgeon of a lover that loves to cut,
and none of them can fix this breach in me.
So I stuff it with rambunctuous patterns and accessories.
I wanted you to be a ravishing accessory for me,
but you're only an accessory to my spirit's assassination.

The coronet of my history still carves a hole in my brain.
With this hole in my chest
and this hole in my brain,
I feel eternally chained to the pain.

It's as if you pierce me just to see if I still can feel.
I can tell you without proof that it's the only thing that's real.

So now my molten emotions have erupted;
evanescing everyone I know away.
I'm lava that not a soul can caress.
It's not a fun game anymore.
I don't want to play anymore.

Tired of feeling like I'm ******* deranged.
They used to cheer my name,
now they whisper it,
as if my maudlin disease is contagious.

I wish I was the hero of my own epic,
but I was drafted into a tragedy
patiently awaiting my somber ending
that seems to never want to visit me.

Your voice
is as if the pebbles in your mouth
are exploding with a citrus ocean,
Colliding with rocks
but falling through to nothing but
a lullaby about wishing upon stars.

and I like when it
sounds like you're crying
but it doesn't want anyone to know

I always thought we sang alike.

I have a dark side
It's just on the inside
Which is why you probably can't see it

The other side of my skin
is the foundation for
a world with no stars

The world would be so different
if I could see it with my body turned inside out
Everybody would see my sadness
the inkiness of my veins
The tears in my blood
making it runny and
my organs aren't sunny
because my heart is the moon

But if everyone else
could see the world with my body turned inside out
maybe they would see that I'm more beautiful on the inside
than I am on the out
Because my organs:
My inky veins and My runny blood and My moon
are more attractive than everyone elses

Or maybe they're not.

Probably not.

My moon just likes to imagine they are.

The spaces between my thoughts
is where I crouch---
          holding my breath.
You screeched, "Ready or not, here I come!"
and I must have been ready
because I'm still hiding
in those tiny spaces between my thoughts.

I want peacefulness
I want contentment
I want to wake up in the morning after the sweetest of dreams and live the day as a fantasy
I want to go to bed after a fantasy and dream the sweetest of realities
I want to not wonder and not have to think so hard to remember those fantasies that were so real
I want you to wonder and think hard all day long to remember me as a fantasy
I want you to search for me in every woman you meet
I want you to dream about me, think about me, try hard to remember me
I want you to care about me
I want to not care about you
I want you to to be constantly troubled by the fact that you can't remember what my voice sounds like anymore
I want you to be thankful that you at least have those voicemails on your machine as evidence
I want you to listen to them everyday and feel guilty that you do
I want you to feel guilty about a lot of things
I want to live in the same neighborhood as you and
I want you to wonder if I'm home every time you walk past my house
I want you to feel my cheek on your shoulder even when it's not there
I want you to not be able to listen to your favorite music anymore because of me
I want you to be nostalgic all the time
I want you to hate yourself for destroying me
I want you to not be able to sleep or eat or breathe because of me
I want nothing from you and everything from you all at once
I want to forgive you
I want to forget you
I want to go back
I want you back
I want to not hate myself for missing you
I want you
I want you
I want us
I want us to go back

Come back.

They're attracted to me,
heels first
cheek scraping against the gravel.

When I'm by myself I'm often
Happy and sad at the same time, and it's nice and
Yet, I never know how to feel good about it

Darling, Dear, Honey, Sweetie
I hate all of these names, even in my
Dreams

I don't know how to feel good about

What I've done, should I have remained
Anonymous to you, not for your own good
I'm far too selfish for
That, but for my own good because I'm

Selfish enough for that, but I don't know if that's a bad thing
Or if I would want to care about you more than myself

Late at night when I can't dream
Or whe there's too much dream about, I have
Nightmares while I lay awake. So I'll stay awake until it's time to say
Good Morning

"Do your poems mean anything or are they just words thrown on paper?"
"I don't understand the question."
"I mean, did you actually think about it? Or are they just meaningless words you wrote down quickly?"
"Just because you write something quickly doesn't mean it doesn't mean anything."
"I just mean did you put thought into them?"
"I'm always thoughtful."
"I don't think you understand the question."
"You're right, I don't."

You Don't
Want to
Know
Anything
About Me.

Congrats,
You Don't
Know
Anything
About Me.

Eyes can be the worst of enemies
They've had me wading in tears
up to my knees
And now I'm waiting with fears
produced by my greed
and longing for what my eyes have seen

You think that now
It wouldn't be the first time it happened
So how do I know that in a couple of weeks or so I won't be worth respecting anymore?
but trust has gotten me into some nasty places
I don't. I just have to trust you.
So how do I know this isn't one of those times?
and you said, "Guys say that **** all the time. I've said that ****."

Nostalgic of the days of
embarrassed faces buried in pillows

I now understand
why my windshield wipers
scream in the rain.

Alcohol's the devil
and he's my only friend.

In the end
it all comes down to the fact
that I still listen to your music
despite how it makes me feel.

Moving inspiration away from words and
moving deep impressions of intention.
Discussing first, the closing off at the end.
Becoming closed, then opening out.
The second time around it's visible
throughout your body.
The birds flying by were calming when
I followed you, cutting through
a quietly working stream.
People around just go ahead and
movements go even when
the professor killed himself.
I'm reading his poems and backing down,
experiencing his struggle.

It's not so much the light at the end of the tunnel,
but the assurance that there's always light in the morning
after you wake up from a horrible nightmare,
You're just dreaming,
I'm just dreaming of these screeching banshees
Birds will chirp in the morning
A phoenix with healing tears will perch on my bedside
Ready to cry on my heart when I awake.

I have conversations with you in my head,
my mouth is moving
          a silent film with a torn screen
I picture what you would say,
wrap your beautiful words in quotation marks.
          If they were real they'd be wrapped in a sunrise
I imagine that I am funnier and wittier than I actually am
so I can imagine the laughter coming from your mouth
          and even though this is a silent film
          your smile in my mind takes handfuls of weight from my heart
          ...and almost makes up for the locked doors that dominate what I see

But the torn screen warps your smile
and those locked doors mock me,
         pouring shovels full of weight back into my heart.

You always bring out the mess in me

The mess that has been collecting dust deep down


You rip it out of me and place it in my hands

For me to wipe clean

So I can look at my reflection and witness my flaws

That have been suffocated by pillows

You give my mess oxygen and allow it to breathe

The mess I have worked so hard to ******

But as it rests in my palms

I realize the innocence that could have died

The beautiful mess that makes me ugly

Is what you would rather see

So now when I see my reflection

I'm looking at the beautiful mess you've made of me.

Kiss with a moldy tongue
See the ground with a head hung
Grow with a soul still young
Dance to the song yesterday sung