My heart is racing skyward
Racing against the moon and stars and my
Ribcage. Beating everything in its path
Catapulting upwards out of my chest
Pushing through the atmosphere and
Ascending to higher dimensions.
My heart is a comet
Shooting through space soaring
Past planets trapping itself in revolutions
Evolutions of life floating about
My heart moves through moves
Forward moves on.

Oh heart! Stay planted stay firm stay rooted inside me! Do not leap to great
Heights if you won't take the rest of me Higher too.

Every time I talk about writing-
My writing, my
Frivolous scribblings-in a
Negative light, you tell me,
"You have to write 200 bad poems
Before you can write a good one."
And I have not known you
Long enough to understand the
Nuances of your speech but
I have learned, quickly, that you
Are poetry
Now, this might sound cliche but what I mean is
That when I see you with your bony knees and
Isaac Newton hair my heart
Dips backward in between my ribs the
Fluid motion of your mouth flipping into a grin is a
Chain reaction to my own smile your
Piano fingers stained with ink or paint or dirt caked in life,
In adventures, are their own language and the way you move
Them when you speak makes a dance, a
Twisty tango of gyration and gesticulation.
Exhaling clouds of smoke from your lungs, you
Frame your forehead with tobacco laurels
And I don't worship you, no, but I admire you,
In the way that you cultivate goodnaturedness but
Hide behind it
In the way that you discuss bigdeal things in a
Nobigdeal way
If you wonder why I like you, it's because you are
Honest in a way that is raw and I've never
Felt someone cut me in two with just a gaze.
You are nervous energy and social anxiety and bred to live in nature.
You are suave in a lanky way and still unsure of yourself.
You are a star collapsing in on itself blazing so bright before you
Burn out.
And I want that.
I want that easiness and integrity and
Dancingontablesbecausewhynot and
Singing a song you don't know the words to in a rubberduck voice.
And I want you.
I want you to want me, to
Want to understand my nuances and quirks and hopes and fears and
Why I cringe inside a body that I never belonged to.
I want your poetry for myself.
So if I have to write 200 bad poems before I write 1 good one,
Regardless of where it falls-and where I fall-
This one is for you.

My bag smells like cigarettes
My body smells like smoke
My mouth is an ashtray
But I taste just like you probably do

I hate smoking
Hate the harsh acidic stale burnt flavor it
Leaves behind on my tongue, the
Match swallower's favorite meal

But every girl I ever kissed
Smelled like cigarettes and smoke and
Tasted like ashtrays
So I wonder if I should maybe just get used to it

Black and white ink-smudged lines letters
Spilling together combinations creating
Words
Words describing life breathing air into
Lungs paper inflated balloons and
Written into lines words
Flowing rivulets from my pen
From my wrists my blood
Is black ink pulsing through my veins
Words
So powerful I want to write them
Over the surface of my skin create
A canvas of color let them
Bleed in until all I am is
Words
All I ever could be all I ever want to
Are combinations of letters
Thrown haphazardly together thoughts Spilled onto paper like paint splatters Thrown at canvases
Creating beautiful violence
Words are a beautiful violence Manufactured for
Love or apathy different combinations of
Letters shoved together at random my Body is nothing
But an amalgamation of Words
May I never know anything less than this Truth.

What they don't tell you-they, the general public, society, doctors, your best friends-
Is that a hospital is more than four white walls
It exists beyond the doctors in starched coats hanging to their knees
Beyond the mutterings of schizophrenic people as they walk by
Beyond the daily pills given and tongues pulled up directly after
Beyond the strip searches, the vitals taken, the evening bed-checks
A hospital lives in stigma
Stigma where you are the outcast, the
Mental patient, the
Crazy one.
A hospital lives in your mind,
In the tormented nightmares you wake up from
Shaking and drenched in sweat
Sheets twisted between white fists
A hospital lives in your gait
The way you swish your hips away from people sometimes
Because you don't want them to know your darkest secret,
Know where your barriers form, where they wall the world around you.
A hospital lives in the faint scars attached to your wrists,
Your stomach
Your thighs
Your calves
Your heart
A hospital becomes a sort of monster in this way
It rots in your memory
Tells you about that one time when things almost ended
Tells other people that you are off, but not in a way anyone can see
Unless they look hard enough
A hospital
Is supposed to heal wounds, Not
Create them.

When I open my mouth, I imagine a chasm exists there,
A hole in between my throat and stomach
That extends endlessly somehow inside my body.
It is dark and damp inside, and my spongy tongue serves nicely
As the floor explorers tread upon.
Sometimes I get lost inside my mouth,
Swallowed whole by the words I never meant to say
Or drowned by the words I didn’t say, still stuck on the roof of the cavern.
Sending down an echo causes my uvula to vibrate
And rumble all the way down to the pit that becomes my intestines.

I am a stone
But if you watch me close enough
You will see the cracks in my foundation
The fissures in my layers
The erosion wearing away at my edges
I am a stone
But I am
**crumbling