words. offered last-minute from thin-air and handed off heavy-hearted. words. nights spent sleepless and throats filled with sand & secrets and fingernails blackened by scratching away at the excess and unnecessary. words. all they do is **** me off because i can't use them right and i find myself drowning in recycled metaphors and romanticized abstract thoughts that have been regurgitated from a hundred different mouths and audaciously labeled as poetry. but i am not a poet, at least not a good one, in fact i can't stand most of my writing but i still try. because words, are the only way i can get the myriad of ideas inside my head to make some kind of sense but they're hardly worth a dollar so that's probably why i'm always broke. words. i learned to read them at five and i thought that was impressive but nowadays children half that age are already doing that, so i guess i'm not that special. but words, at times my only friend and often my greatest enemy, have the power to reduce crowds of thousands to tears and according to the book on my father's bedside table they once parted a sea. words can change a world. but they can be weapons of unfathomable destruction. it was words, that made me think i was ugly. words i longed to hear but never did drove me to starve for affirmation from the opposite ***. words on magazines told me what i needed to be and told me nobody would want me if i didn't comply. so it was words that made me stop eating, but not for long, because i am lucky enough that my love of food overpowers the hatred i have for my body. words made me tear my skin to shreds in the still of the night because they somehow managed to crawl beneath it without ever having actually entered in through my ears. words can either give life or they can take it. words are sticks and heavy stones and swords and we're taught that they can't break your bones but tell that to the first generation to have anti-bullying laws enacted because of nooses around necks and bullets through brains and blades on wrists all caused by words. so i urge you to craft your words with care and let them be like summer breezes upon the ears you speak them to. let your words be bandaids and hot air balloons instead of daggers and eulogies. speak like honeysuckle not wisteria. words are vines that wrap themselves around and consume whomever they have been said to. people can have memories shockingly resemblant to pachyderms so be aware that your words can live on like ghosts long after you thought they would have died. words are oceans upon which people can either float or sink below, and you are the decider.

- m.f.