O Mr. Tin Man,
Do I have a problem with you.
Your privileged steel of thought
Has taken everything you lack
For granted.
How could you wish away your coat of armor
For yellow flesh when
I have felt nothing but cold
covering my body
Freezing over me into a mobile glacier
Floating into the abyss of an Alaskan sea.
You see, Mr. Tin Man, your coat of steel
May be cold but can’t you see
You still have a coat?
Mr. Tin Man,
How can you wish away the vacancy in your chest
For a warm heart to move in when
I have felt nothing but constant emptiness
Rip open my own, draining
Into nothing by the pupation of pain strangling
itself, hanging itself with the noose
Made Up of my own arteries in attempt of
Stopping my blood flow because maybe
That will make me feel something.
Mr, Tin Man,
Your skin may be steel and your chest may be heartless
But can’t you see that you cannot break.
Mr. Tin Man,
I look at my reflection and all I see is the green of my skin,
Jealousy within that we are so alike, yet not the same at all.

It’s the mornings you wake up and the heaviness of your eyes are nothing compared to the heaviness in your chest. It’s the moments throughout the day you’re surrounded by all that love and adore you and you are still drowning in the loneliness. It’s the nights you lie awake wired with a megaphone prompter set to the highest volume in your skull repeating all of those thoughts you swore you’d never say aloud. It’s the seconds, the minutes, the hours, days, weeks, months that you feel as if you feel nothing in attempt to feel everything and you’re trying so hard to get to the surface of land while you’re drowning in the middle of the ocean, too heavy to swim. You see where you want to be and as you move every joint in your body, you’re going nowhere but down. Down. Down. Down to the bottom of your heart, down to the bottom of your stomach, to the bottom of your toes. The fuzzy feeling of a television on the fritz the black and white static going in and out, the blurry vision of nothing while all is in front of you and yet you are still sinking, drowning like the fish that can’t swim, you’re still watching that grayscaled fuzz and listening to the muffled up noises on the television that you can’t clearly make out while the remote is in your hands. That’s the worst part about it. That’s the ugly truth of it all. That our struggle, while it entails pain and chaos, we have the controls to change them. Our stories are complex. Maybe we can’t change the characters or the rising actions. It may be possible that the ****** is our of our control. We can’t do anything about how we got in the middle of the ocean, or how we turned the broken channel on, But within the falling action of it all, we can get ahold of it. We can grasp at it, tug on it, and we can morph it into our life jacket. We can build it into our own remote controler, we can change the perception of it all. The plot twists, the cliffhangers, those are what we can encompass and embrace, what we ourselves control and can incorporate to change the story. It is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate a story or poem just as it is set in our mind’s eye how we perceive and annotate our own story. Because in the end of it all, it comes down to what we are doing about it. Are we the ones putting rocks in our clothes so rather than our floating, we proceed to the very depths of suffocation? Are we the ones that pressed the volume button on the remote in order for the static to grow higher and higher to the point of deafness? As you reflect on your story, are you reading your metaphors right, are you interpreting the imagery and creative visualizations in a way that shows beauty within the ugly, are you appreciating the art of similes and detail that you were able to create throughout whatever your story entails? Or are you so engulfed in your ineptitude to look at the whole picture as just that, with no interpretation of it all? You only read your monologues rather than the dialogues within. You sparknoting your life. Have you ever taken an exam after sparknoting a book and it’s only when you have the lines of the paper in front of you that you realize that you know nothing? That’s what you’re doing when you only dwell on the obvious of your life. You’re not searching within to fill the plot holes and answering questions that are worth answering. Take advantage of syntax. The descriptions of the water, how cold it may feel emotionally and physically or why you can’t seem to turn the channel of your television when it’s only placing you in a realm of distress. You see what everyone sees, you know what everyone knows without ever understanding. It’s the words in between that tell a reader what to feel and why you feel that way. You’re cheating yourself out of individuality and the acceptance of a resolution worthy of acceptance. So as you write the rest of your story, write it in a way that will make you content with the ending. Give yourself an ending that you are satisfied with, that makes it easy to close the book and start on to the new one- because remember, you are not the only one reading it. Be proud of your story. Give your character the lifejacket. Give yourself the life jacket.

Have you ever looked at yourself in the
mirror and you just can't recognize yourself?
Yeah, those are my eyes,
and my nose,
and my lips...
Physically, that is me. I see my body
unhindered.
But there is a phantom there nonetheless-
haunting what is supposed to be
me.
It's like I am here, with all of you
and I am laughing and telling the story of
that one time... Always "that one time."
There are thousands of "that one time stories" I tell
you the way I want you to hear them
but never the way I want to tell them,
Yes, there's the facts but can you sense any of the emotion?
"But how did that make you feel?"
how did that make you feel?
Six words I've never heard
but six words I ask myself every day
A question I ask but I can never bring myself to answer.
A question so straightforward has become my archenemies
and something so simple has become so complicated.
And maybe that's why I can't answer, or won't.
The answer may be easy, but the truth,
the truth is difficult.
I don't know the exact words
or how to make you understand
It's like I'm suffocating and my breathing is
getting harder and harder, heavier and heavier.
I don't know if this is what it feels like to drown
or get buried alive...
but maybe subtract the water and dirt
and replace it with words, and I could imagine
it is.
All of the words left unspoken
and silenced,
the phrases I've kept hidden in my locked chest filled with
secrets and lies
the sentences I've tried to deny to the world, to every astral plane,
and to the demons I've allowed to take residence inside my very core.
I know there's such thing as a pill much too large to swallow,
but nowhere in my mind did I know that silence fit the expression perfectly.
And perfectly,
The words I could never utter I consumed- and alike I've swallowed one too many.
And now my eyes stare bloodshot,
my nose breathe like that in a doldrums state,
and my lips purse blue and frozen.
Internally, everything is shutting down.
So yes, when I see myself in the mirror,
the figure is familiar but I do not know
that reflection.
So when I look in the mirror,
I do not see me-
Instead, I see a visitor
overstaying a visit.
A visitor
longing nothing more
than a tranquil release back into
the current.

again and again I tripped.

the first time
my shoelaces had been
white,
pure from the silt.
I noticed a stain from
the grime,
not bleak to the
first glance
but I knew my lacs
had lost
their purity.

one more time,
a piece of thread unraveled.
again, not drastic
to perception
but it was clear
my shoelaces
were erupting due
to the results of my reckless
wanderings.

again and again I tripped
and by the time I decided to face
myself in order to
reflect upon my ineptitude,
I didn't know who I was
or where I had been.

I was forced to ponder
my shoelaces
for what they really
were: unrecognizably filthy

my shoelaces were now charcoal,
fringed and covered by all the them for were
their ruined mess
muck and dirt I put them through.
I wondered if anyone could
tell that they were
once untainted and unattained
or if all they saw of them
were their ruined mess.

again and again I tripped
and I began to wonder
if there was any reason to get
back up again?

I gave all that I could give
and the result was
anesthetic sentiment
and
obscene shoelaces.

I fell in love with the moon
Only when she was leaving
Only when she was hurting
When the sky turned blue
the darkness would shift
and she slowly casted away
But every morning,
in the last hour of moon
I became aware of her
and all of her secret
And when she was dying,
I loved her
I didn't want her to go
but I didn't want her darkness
to surround me forever.
Please moon,
stay with me
Never let it grow
too dark
Never let me
lose sigh
Please moon,
let me see forever
Never leave me
No, never leave me

All you see is what's in front of you.
My melted brown eyes and messy brown hair to match.
You see the clothes touching the skin-
or better yet
the parts of me the clothes aren't touching.
What, you noticed my dimples when I smiled? And what do you hear?
Do you hear me howling when I laugh?
Do you hear my voice raise as I tell my story?
Listen more closely. Shh.
If you're quiet enough, you'll hear yelling.
Do you hear it?
It's me.
And if you look closer, you'll notice that there
are a hundred shards of shattered glass.
That's me too.
You didn't know that,
did you?
I'm breaking- slowly deteriorating before your very eyes
but you didn't notice- or you chose not to, at least.
I wish I were more like you.
I wish I could ignore the noise
and avoid looking at the broken pieces.
I wish I was as content as you are
knowing that I am ebbing away into nothing
slowly, but surely

The pain was excruciating
It rapidly developed into a sort of chaos,
cluttered wit intensifying jolts of emotion
Fairly like a garden
once filled with such
verve.

Once so beautiful
yet rotting away to the shams
of deathly existence.

My pain felt like a rose
plucked from its roots too soon-
so alluring

Able to captivate my eyes
away from the pandemonium
I once called home.

None the less, ebbing away
to nothing but a sterile floret.

I'm in need of a
Gardener
to bring about
My Vitality
once more.

I can't seem to write when I'm in the "state of unknown"
When I have nothing hugging my waist,
Or tugging my chest,
Or weighing my feet.
I don't know know what there is to write about really.

When I write,
I bleed, I cry, I pour my heart out
Whether I am diving into the lake of infatuation,
Or I'm drowning in the river of despair.
It allows me to be vulnerable with my words,
It gives me the key to unlock new characters,
Extreme characters.
Characters that unravel letters and create anecdotes
Or raw feeling.

In my theatre,
It's me.
It's me and only me talking
Crying, reacting, feeling all there is to endure.
I have motives for my characters and for my poetry.

But in my state of unkown,
I don't know how to feel
Or what to expreas
And my monologue turns to a dialogue
With out her people influencing my character
My state of unknown doesn't let me know
If I am happy, or content, or lonely
Whether I should be thankful or hopeful
Do I stop to smell the roses or do I go on a quest for new adventure?

My state of unknown begs me to ask the question'
"Am I really a writer?"