toes are cold against the bathroom floor, tiles, pink
and i am balancing bobby pins on the tips of my fingers while
my sister rattles the locked door ****, there's no fire but her voice speaks flames, tongues of red that echo off the walls and slowly burn out,
and i let the faucet run away with itself and it gladly agrees and
I crack open the window because I'm still learning to breathe.
And hell to it all when I turn on the radio and my sister's still screaming and maybe the house really is burning down but I wouldn't know
the only balance I've ever felt is at the edges of my hands,

So I pin my hair back and I go

When you spend your entire life comforting yourself
you tend to forget exactly who you are
and I've been looking in the mirror more,
not because I like what I see but because I want to understand
my existence, I don't want to feel pretty I want to know if that's one of my labels
I don't want to feel loved, I want to know if I am.
And when you stare at your reflection you are given the ability to see
the shell of your body, divorced from feelings divorced from itself,
something your very much alive flesh can't accomplish and trust me I've tried
I've tried I've tried
It's a type of death when you miss out on your own life.
It's a type of death when you're too busy hoping people love you
that you disconnect, cut the cord, there was no goodbye, only
camouflaged lies lies lies
And I comfort myself and I comfort myself and shh it's okay
and I play the role of a lover and you'd think that
due to the immense amount of time I tell myself it's fine
that I wouldn't mind when I get let down, dropped
waking up on cold sheets and a numb heart

I remember the day I cried,
because I saw on tv the girls
my age, audition for the nutcrucker
ballet girls, tied in pink.
And that meant that I'd have no time to rehearse
And that meant that I'd not be able to teach myself,

*And I didn't even have those shoes
that they wear.

Once there was an extrovert who dreamed of keeping her cool
But when the guests arrived and the room bubbled
with possible stories to tell and comments to make
her wall-flower capabilities shed like snake skin
and her voice stirred the crowd
and they all swore that the weather
was controlled by her breath
pushing out words.

Once there was an extrovert who dreamed of being cool,
okay, maybe not really. Maybe just a little.
The type of cool that says they aren't but are
but she was too loud
and extrovert-ed
and her cool divorced her body a really long time ago.

Once there was an extrovert who wanted to be
the reflection of everything introvert
totally wasn't, so she spoke up
and her petals fell from her neck
onto the ground and were trampled on,
and the wall-paper started to tear
off her shoulders, and in fact
it wasn't sticking at all.

It felt kind of nice.

Washington's damp. The wood's soft and the trees
seem like they're just waking from some cosmic hibernation.
The water's cold and the sound is silent, minus the lapping water
as it comes to shore,
whispering good mornings.

there was this moment
this split fraction of a second where
the pharaoh wasn't sure if he actually did love her.
there was this breath of doubt that washed his eyes
but the moment he opened them it was gone.
And the men there saw it and the women did too
and they wrote it down, they captured that look
and they etched it's wide letters into the book of secrets
only they could tell.
And I have studied these texts
and I have read and reread them,
and still when I let my eyes trace yours
there is something
lost in translation.

I don't see why love is compared to spring.
It's nothing new.
If anything, love would be autumn:
The slow sense of losing yourself,
The mixed signals to go with the weather,
The way you shed the layers of your words
so that the bare bones of truth
become vulnerable to the cold,
and the leaves of every syllable lay
motionless on the ground.

I don't even know what I'm doing I guess.
I have never been here before. I have never felt
the bitter effects of being so close to seventeen that
You can taste it.
I've never fully put myself out on a limb yet.
I've never dangled so high above the canyons of- I don't even know what.
(sorry, I'm too tired to think of a metaphor).
I've never tried so hard to win before,
hell, I've never really wanted to win before.
I'm strung together with motown and old violin strings
and also the constant nagging to become something.
I really don't want to, please don't make me.

I really like those clouds*
is what i tell my mom in the car going down the hill into garland- ***** grimy stained,
city of which I semi-love mostly hate.
They were long strips of cotton, the underbelly of a zebra,
and- don't tell- but they reminded me of you.
Her response, which ones? and then
I wonder what they mean.
                      I wonder what we mean
is how I first respond in my head, but don't worry,
i correct myself.
and then a wave of nauseating annoyance embraces my body and I become so sick of the words "what it means" that I want to sprout wings and fly home.
But we keep going further and further down the hill, we are in garland,
when she redeems herself:
it looks like the sea, they are the islands in an ocean of sky.
I like the answer, and so I tell my wings, and my hopes, not to grow.

it's my theory that
we only notice the small changes
the small edits to life, the small movements that
fall just outside of the normal line of everyday
it's my theory that when two people are simultaneously in love
nothing past the outer doors of each other's eyes truly matters
and today,  I realized the trees no longer have leaves.

the ultra-sound of love
must go something like this:
first a slow turn; a white line on
the black canvas and then-
a dim heartbeat as if
it would take the biggest of
all microphones to hear it and then-
a kick to your stomach,
because let's face it:
love hurts bad.
and let's face it:
it's the hurt that reminds you it's alive.

there is something alive and on fire underneath skin
something glowing and moving and liquid
something blushing and cussing
and aching and mourning
and desperately trying
to leave.

I try really hard to grasp what's real
and realize what I'm grasping.