Sometimes,

I think of taking my hands
And ripping - splitting - cracking,
My ribcage in two.
                                                            ­            
The breastbone splintering apart,
My torso opening like a rotten tree.
The inside hollowed,
Like a lake that has been emptied
 
I've convinced myself that
Fragrant flowers
Would grow there.

That they would grow feverishly
In the gnawing gap
I had created.

And that time would preserve
What I had done.

who i used to be
and who i'll be tomorrow.*

i'm not sure who i am anymore.
chasing the ideals of someone i'm not
reaching for the goals of someone
i don't really know myself to be
i got lost, tangled up in dreams
that disappear as soon as they touch my fingertips.

the person in the mirror doesn't even
look like me anymore. those
dark circles under her eyes from many
sleepless nights, the chapped lips
and the dry knotted hair. that isn't me,
that can't be me.

yet within myself i know that she and i,
we're one and the same.

who am i?

The only constant
Is change..

So embrace it.

and i wonder,
do you ever think of her
and what you could have been.
futures that were planned
but never successfully played out?

do you ever hear a song
that instantly takes you to a place
belonging to you and her
and nobody else?

do you ever compare me
and think of all the ways i fail
where she would have succeeded?

its okay,
if you do,
i would understand.

because memories have a way
of sticking around,
especially the good ones,
especially if you don't want them to.

their sound is cacophony
buried deep in the trenches  
of your mind. they say it's
like a prison these days,
wounds and warriors
bound tight by the old
vines of loss and loneliness.
you look in the mirror
and you see the pale
reflection of a ghost,
someone you used to be,
the soul of life so long
gone that her shape is
tenuous at best, a translucent
curtain between this life
and another, one where maybe
you didn't live as an empty
vessel desperate for meaning.
maybe in that life you didn't
live as an undoing. the fractured
lines of this life are smooth
glass there, unmarred by
want and need, unbroken.
in another life,
you are clean.

Bonfire,
Roasting, toasting
Marshmallows
The smell of a cackling fire
People, too many people
That's I've been trying to hide from,
It reminds me that I'm real,
It reminds me that I'm a human with needs,
It reminds me of how those needs go unattended
I laugh and smile more than anyone,
Yet I am secretly, The saddest

I thought possibly,
Romantic love could cure this soul disease,
But I've come to realize
No one can quite fill the void of
The family that abandoned me,
Like a helpless raft adrift at sea,
I'm about to drown,
And no one can even see me

Society, I can't even describe how much I hate it,
Forcing us to conform and conceal love,
Writing and art are my only escapes,
From this prison of silence,
And of being unknown,
I cry in the quiet of the night,
Because after the day of calculated smiles and perfectly formulated sentences,
I know,
I walk this earth alone.

Callused fingertips, bruised up lips, but
when the day is done, you're still my sun.
A star so high; digging me a grave so low.
Love is complete when it's this skin deep.