Why I no longer lie or change:

I loved a strong man
he made me feel weak
He choked my songs
my voice ceased to sing
I loved a hero
but he zapped my strengths
Took my strong words
broke them beneath his feet
My words for him were love
his were hate
all my insecurities
he said he was trying to push away
until the day
he decided I had changed too much
Because I had changed too much
Changed by every word he said
He decided to break his promise
forget the ring I wore
And take another girl to bed.


There are no good memories of you:

I hate that I can remember being loved by you
The look in your eyes the first time we slept together
it was a January morning you wore a green sweater
I remember how you said our names all mixed together
I don’t know when we changed
but your oh ****, your ending phrase
your truth turned lie
blew back over everything
I have no good memories left of you
they are all tainted by hatred and pain
now I hate the way you said my name
how it was not as safe on your lips as I believed
And I hate what you had made of me
by the end
I hate what we could have been.
I do not hate that we are not
I am glad that you are gone
I only wish that you had thought
to leave my heart alone.


Your bookshelf was too small:

Though your suggestions were good, though you read every classic, though you knew every (over-spoken) line, you knew too narrow a scope. Though I agree that very little remains unspoken after the classic works. Your shelf of scarcely over seven books, and the fact I never saw you read one, should have conveyed to me a point of disaster that I somehow did not see coming. I have drunk in the words of others since I was a child. I have dived in bargain bins and raided library discards for one more book to read. You could have afforded a library beyond what I could have imagined, and your greatest concerns would have been what people thought of the books you kept and if their spines all matched. I have read almost every book on my shelves. I think they number in the hundreds and I have read so many more besides. And you, you disdained new work. Your pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual paths fooled even me, until I believed that maybe you, with your little shelf, could offer me something I had not yet discovered. I think you thought so too. But my honest thoughts on you loving a writer are that you, with your little shelf and your boxes and your preconceived notions of what people should be, had no way of knowing how to love someone as open as a writer; someone who can turn their whims with the setting of the sun, who can live in worlds you have never seen and longs only to share them. You with your little boxes and your little shelf never deserved my mind or my stories in your life. I am glad my books never found homes on your shelves.