I gave her my teddy bear.
A bear that had loyally guarded my side for 3916 nights
Fighting off the face of darkness with honor and courage
He was a friend to me when no one else heard me cry
He heard me weep and always was there my little teddy bear
As mom boarded up her car and began to live a new life
Without me
I gave her my teddy bear
Now nobody can save me from the dark for only could
My little teddy bear

-GoCe

You are a clock without hands.
A living metaphor, forever vague and paradoxical,
A second-hand gem that I can only admire
behind the safety of a glass case.
You are the dust on my knees,
A part of me that I will soon have to let go.

A fools paradise
I can feel myself slowly edging towards the sensation
The sensation that so many in my spot has felt
A rush that makes you feel alive even though it may be fatal

When I butter my bread
Cut the veggies and onions
Slice the tomatos
Crack a hole in the ketchup seal
My mind drifts to it
Wanting to feel it so bad
But knowing the consequences
I have always thought of it as a false paradise
A place where the nearly dead find a way to get closer to death
But feel as if they have gone further away from it


A fools paradise

-rae

"This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper"
As i sat here, on this bench, in the absolute freezing cold reading "The Hollow Men"
I realized, i really wished it would have ended with a bang.
I wish we would have confronted each other face to face, and said all the things we were thinking
I wish you would have reached into your brain
and pulled out the gun I know is in there
every truth, a shotgun shell tearing me up from the inside out.

I wish you would have been there with your bullet syllables
and your tongue that was as sharp as a knife, cutting words into my skin,
making my ******* up past, visible to the naked eye.
i wish you would have told me how enervating it was to be my friend
and how exhausting it was to be the one i told everything to
i would have replied i thought thats what drew you to me, that i was serious, honest ,and definitely ****** up, so different from you
i know you would have said maybe you're too ****** up, even for me
and i'd watch you walk away, a retreating form in the distance, something i was used to seeing
and even though it hurt me supremely, at least i'd hear the closure coming from your lips.

But none of this wishing got me anything.
no, of course not.
what i got was frozen messages, a summer spent ignored, a distant call, and a petty, stupid decision that you made, to make me feel like the worthless human being i am.
you faded out, once my constant, now my nothing.
They say with grief our support may falter, and you faltered. You fell, no, jumped right through the cracks,
deciding i was too much weight, too much baggage for you.
So now i sit reading T.S Elliot alone on my friday night and you,
oh you,
you're probably telling everyone about the real broken family i come from.

"This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper"
i couldn't have said it better myself.

In a shattered, boneless sleep
I pray the lord my soul to keep
for if I should stay another day
I may just take my life away

not a sky of grey or blue
or really any other hue
or frozen, crystalline, pouring rain
will fix my deeply, troubled brain

not the darkness, thats so sublime
or memories of stolen times
or the endless beautiful waves
will clear my eyes of all those graves

so when you take a look at me
I genuinely ask you what you see?
do you recognize the clockwork of my mind
or the confining restraints with which you bind

so I wake from my shattered, boneless sleep
with a sigh I begin to weep
my lungs can't expand and I can't breathe
so I shut my eyes and dive in deep

i pray the lord my soul to keep

Parents, teachers, guardians, all authority figures
have put this importance
this upmost importance
on the loss of innocence
but they have not stood in the shoes of the teenagers of this age
the teenagers who have lost their innocence
(or if you are apart of the lucky group you are on the cusp of losing it)
its not just the physical aspect
in fact it has nothing to do with having *** at all
losing your innocence is much much more.
Its the first time you see your mom popping pills through the crack in the door
its the first time your own sister steals from you so she can fund her ****** habit
its the first time you get slapped
its the first time you slap someone
its the first time you turn to music, or books, or drugs, or drinking just to get out of your own head
its the first time you'll do anything to be numb for a little while
but its not just the bad stuff
no its beautiful too
its that night you got drunk and sat on your back in the grass and had a conversation with the stars
its looking at that lopsided smile, that dimple, and that chipped tooth and feeling something
its making the wrong decision on purpose because you just need the distraction
so basically what i'm saying is the loss of innocence isn't all bad and it isn't all good
but its something that happens to all of us
theres no defining moment
theres no epiphany where you feel the loss like something physical
its not real or tangible
and its not the same for everybody
for her its standing over her moms casket
for him its when he shot up that first time
for me its all the good and the bad that i wrote down and spit out in this poem
And for you... well thats what you have to figure out.

"I knew this girl once,
she had long hair, so long it whispered tiny kisses along her hips and waist
she had the oddest bluest eyes i'd ever seen, the color of the sky right before it gets completely dark
her thick, long eyelashes framed those eyes, and freckles formed constellations across her cheeks
i could almost draw the big dipper and Orion's belt on her milky white face.
She didn't know i existed but i admired her from afar. I could tell she was educated- She always had some form of poetry in her hand. But of all the things i could have noticed about her i noticed her bookmarks. She would lose them all the time, i would see her chasing after the scraps of paper as they flew through the wind down the street. She'd stick anything in between those pages, wrappers of all sorts, leaves, pennies, shoelaces, once i even saw a page ripped from a different book. It became my favorite game to guess what the next bookmark would be.  After awhile she stopped chasing the various bookmarks across the city and she cut all that long hair off, then awhile after that she started using unoriginal, uninspired plain old bookmarks.Then even awhile that she stopped bringing books altogether, until one day she didn't show up. Nobody knew that beautiful, mysterious, bookmark making girl was locked up inside her own mind. Nobody knew she hated her long hair and her freckles and even those baby blues. Nobody knew that she couldn't stand to live in her skin anymore so much that she swallowed a couple pills one night to ease away the pain. Even worse was she didn't know i watched her for so long and thought she was the most interesting human being i'd ever encountered. That girl committed suicide because she hated herself learn from her mistake, my mistake, everyone who ever noticed her bookmarks mistake, and don't do this, don't off yourself with a .45 before you've even had a chance to live" he's desperate now  
"please please you don't have to do this" he sputters

I answer simply " I never was much of a bookmark girl, i always dog-eared my pages"

*bang

It was 3 in the morning.
When i turned over i saw that picture of us,
the one of you in that sweater and the tiny chip in your tooth from when you fell up my steps
the one of me in a hoodie not looking in the camera but past it at the ocean beside us.
it filled me to the brim with anger
my veins occupied with that emotion
my eyes and brain and thoughts clouded with red
before i knew what i was doing that picture wasn't there anymore
instead it was face down, the frame shattered across the floor
Bits of glass glittered in the slant of moonlight coming through my window,
the one that allowed me to see the picture in the first place.
It was then i realized that your memory littered every surface of my room
in a fit of rage i ripped the pictures from my wall and tore them into pieces,
in a fit of rage i snapped the mix of my favorite music that you made me when i had a cold last march
in a fit of rage i slammed my hand into the window
because it was the only thing that made me feel something
i wasn't surprised when no one came to check what had happened
in a fit of complete sorrow i sunk to the floor on my back,fist cradled to my chest, and slowly opened my eyes
I began to laugh uncontrollably when i recognized the glow- in- the-dark stars on my ceiling
I really couldn't do anything right.

Five  simple words
uttered so carelessly out of your  perfect mouth
just syllables and letters strewn together
You had no idea that those
simple, careless, beautiful words
were my saving grace

I can still recall
the way the air felt that evening
as the sun tried its hardest to stay in the sky
purples, oranges, pinks, blues, and reds
it looked like the bruise on my face.

I can still hear the ** and the ceremonies playing loud in my ears
as the car raced down the stretch of street, the marsh on either side
all the windows down, my feet on the dashboard
my hand out the window, splintered by the last fragments of light in the sky

I can still recall you smiling so sweetly at me as you handed me that thing
that not-quite-a-cigarette thing, and me taking a long pull
how I got this bruise was long forgotten
so was my broken home and heart
i smiled right back at you as those perfect lyrics filled my head
they were the only things i could focus on

after that.