You sit at your screen
fingertips flying in the face of decency
like a spigot attached to a vat of arsenic
dripping your poison, slowly, surely into the ears of the unthinking.

You justify the burnt skin, the orphans, the unending torture as deserved.

Deserved?

How can it be so?

Go tell the orphan, scarred and screaming that her fate was deserved.

Go stand beside mass graves and thumb your nose at the deserving corpses, stained by the blood of ages.

Where is your heart? 
does it choke and sputter,
buried beneath your all encompassing loathing?

You call me stupid, maybe so,
my views naive, my compassion wasted
yet my heart beats proudly, swells with love 
while my tired eyes drown at the unfolding horror.

War is not a spectator sport,
it is not justifiable, nor deserved.

Call me stupid if you will, ridiculous if you must
call me any number of names in your attack on my spirit
I will not care, I will not bend or bow.
Your hatred will be your undoing.
Not mine

You hate my poems
You say they take me from you
that they're pointless
a waste of time
maybe you're right.
You read them,
just the words as they fall,
and say you get nothing
just syllables.
I have lost count
of the sighs and eyerolls,
the you have no talents,
they sit in a memory box
along with the times you've asked me to stop.
Stop.
Just like that.
Stop pouring myself onto paper,
Stop looking for beauty in darkness,
Stop healing.
You prefer me broken, fragile, dependant,
the girl you took from nowhere to god knows where
a once pretty, broken thing
to hang silently from your arm
while you talk proudly of the soul that you saved.
You fear that my writing will end us.
I fear that my stopping will end me.

I will scream into the void with you. Take my hand, let me calm your fears.I will weave my words into a shelter, a place of grace for your troubled heart.

Walk with me until the stars dim forever, until the sun implodes and only dust remains. I am here with you, there with you. Let my tangled thoughts be your remedy, your darkest dreams my salvation. Take my light, for I would rather walk in darkness unending than see the weight of sorrow on your pretty brow.

You are my privilege, my haven, my friend, this will always be, as long as there is breath I will use it to sing of my wonder at your strength and my joy at your existence.

If you believe in nothing else, I beg that you believe in me

Dear Talia,

I don't want to be a tortured artist.
I don't want to be depressed and I don't want to be anxious.
Competitive sadness and disorders treated like accessories disgust me.

The world glamorizes mental illness, and I don't understand why. There is nothing romantic about being mentally ill just like how there's nothing glamorous about a broken wrist or a torn medial collateral ligament. There's nothing romantic about constantly being afraid that the world will fold in itself and **** you with it. There's nothing romantic about feeling like you could break down and cry at any moment.

This is the first piece I've written while being medicated.

I want it to be Christmas already.

The world dreams itself a halo, but can only attain horns. The halo is an illusion and the horns are an idea.

I'm due to take another Lorazepam. Would I look cool to the kids who idolize dysfunction and misinterpret pain as style, if I were to take one of these, with water and a distant glance, in front of them? Geez, to have their approval would to have everything and nothing at all.

I'm not sure why I've written as much about this as I have.

You.

It is 2:48 am and all I can think about, in this moment, is you.

I can't wait to spend Christmas with you. I can't wait to wear bad Christmas sweaters, and be the couple everyone hates, as we sing Christmas carols and spread holiday cheer.

I wrote this poem a few minutes ago. Sometime around 2:30 am. I'm not sure. I'm exhausted:

I sat on the edge of my bed, and on the edge of my life,
medicated to the point of pointlessness. Soft.
It was the nineteenth, not the twentieth,
and I wished I saw the fireworks with her fifteen days earlier.

My gasps tore the shingles off of the house.
And they hung suspended above the hole in the roof.
And God stared down into my room, as the shingles swirled skyward.
"I see you," I said, "but I don't believe in you."

I left home and ran until I was a dream that had passed itself.


I hope that was okay.

I love you.


Yours,

Joshua Haines

~


Illumined by a seamless crescent moon
suspended above our heart’s desire
Breaths filter through wisteria dreams
as silhouettes embrace against a background
of fireflies and pine needle whispers

A scented breeze through whispers moves
as hearts entwine at midnight's call
with gentle hand to lead the way
and silent smile to loving eye

For in this gaze I know a shimmer,
to taste these lips, soft of twilight wine
Lost now within this dark abandon,
the scent of jasmine feeds the air as
passion grows in dewdrop longings

and there, discovered by the dawn
to purest love our hearts succumb
no more to dwell amongst the lonely
our faith restored we lay, unmoving~
*Forever here, forever one