i like to take pictures of me smiling
because i am a ginger baby
and we were born to grin,
daddy says so.

i like to look at them later
and remind myself how to arrange my lips
my cheeks
and the little rainbows
that live around my eyes
when i cannot think for a second
how on earth
i used to
smile

smile,
baby
they say
and you can have this one
for
free

some people have
really nice clothes
and
really nice cameras
to take pictures of themselves
in their clothes
with
and they
put them all over the internet
so they can say without saying
that they are better
than me
and i guess that's alright.
i don't have that kind of money for clothes
and even if i did
i hope i wouldn't be like them
plastering themselves on facebook
in edgy poses
painted with instagram filters
i hope i would be like i am now
a twenty year old girl
who buys new clothes twice a year
but adopts books like newborn babies
and can smile
genuinely
when the lord wills
a touch of
happiness

i guess what i'm trying to say
is
your designer jeans hurt my feelings
as does your expression
but i wouldn't want to
be you.

She is Sunday service love letters written in the centrefold
of a hymn book.
A coffee stain smile hiding the words of my favourite pages
of poetry that sits every night next to my bed.
This is my doomsday notebook rolled into the edges of cut off jeans
and you were my judgement day,
standing on the edge of a cliff pretending that my life didn't depend on it
in that second,
depend on me.

She is my Maundy Thursday:
give away everything I own like I can live with nothing.
Live like I don't exist anymore.
Leave without a trace like burning,
because that's how I am when I don't remember you now.

Sitting in my bedroom with the lights turned out
you moving next to me like dancing with the covers off.
She promised me Saturday nights and feather dreaming
and now all I can do is this.
She told me the next evening:
'so many of these boys are clueless, I really hope I'm not'
I tell her 'I don't think you are
anymore'.
She says I'm down to earth.
I think she is too when her head isn't stuck above the clouds
there are things I would give to see what she sees
when she looks down.

I want to talk about gods with her.
I want to know if every medicated son of god complex really was
a psych case
or simply someone trying to finally send us down something good,
like we pretend we would see it when it happens.
Someone tell me how people
can paint the sky with their guts and the broken dreams of strangers
and call it religion.
How can these gods hate any kind of love?

Tell me why you wanted to die the year before you were a teenager.
How you're still trying five years on like you can't face
the seven months before you become an adult.
I don't know if you're terrified of real life
or being a child,
or if you still sweat in the middle of the night at thoughts
of an incarcerated man's hands touching your innocent body
like it was ever supposed to know what to do with itself.
Your body a haunted house, breaking from the cracks
you left in yourself.

You couldn't leave your own ghosts out.
Is this why 'god' lets you be so afraid of living in your own skin?
that you will dice yourself into pieces
praying for bad fate for once, tonight,
you're out of luck this time honey.

I'm sorry I don't know what to say to you nowadays,
I just don't want you to be all my fault.
I'm sorry I can't talk to you like I used to, like I didn't know
you were a time bomb
but I can't pretend you didn't light your own fuse,
because all you feel is leaking out the lines you left in your own skin.
I find it hard to believe you will ever actually detonate,
but I am more than over prepared for any hint of explosion:
buried my head in a glass case,
pretend that whiskey could ever take away the pain
like you were barrel aged.
So go ahead
knock yourself out.
I can pretend I didn't feel anything like you did all those years.

You sit, breathing in the last shreds of sunset like the sun reclining could make you any more alive I tell you
just stop trying.

You are a painting.
Da Vinci,
3 years on,
incomplete,
no idea of your own beauty.
Your glazed surface
isn't cracked yet.
You are a work of art waiting to be fully formed.
Paints hand-made, every brush stroke a sacrifice,
you're more than this oil
not an acrylic, he can't paint out your mistakes.
Tell me how does it feel to be the pigment in your lips does it feel like home?
Can you see me?
How does it feel to hang all those years
do you forget every face?
Can you hear what I'm trying to tell you
for once?

If you see her, can you tell her:
I only wish I could have captured her on film
before she left
me.

we haven't spoken in months but
just so you know, today
we're fighting
'cause when he tried to kiss me
in ohio
i wouldn't let him,
feeling guilty as my
heart
is with you
in california
beating on the floor
while you listen
to the sound
of hers.

i don't feel like i've
really been born
yet

it seems like life doesn't
start until the age
of 18 or 21

If you see my ex girlfriend can you tell her,
tell her i took her t-shirt and ripped it up,
tell her i made something good, **** good out of it,
and it fit real well,
in all the places i've got left;
can you tell her, tell her,
i still have her shelves she left me,
and on the shelves full of heavy books and antique cameras,
lies a card she once wrote for me,
because it reminds me to be strong,
and tell her this card,
even though it sits on her shelves,
it is no way a regard to thoughts of her, now, still.
Can you tell her,
I threw away all the kitten food i had left over,
I took the kittens to a new home,
because they would be better with someone else,
i thought, that was for the best,
it was for the best,
can you tell her that?
Can you tell her that,
I miss her, but i don't mourn her,
I don't care to feel anything for her anymore,
as i look at the pictures,
i left of us, messing around,
in the park,
the two most beautiful girls we knew,
that i never deleted.
Can you tell her it took a year and another girl to get over her?
Can you tell her,
it was her that made me get over her?
In her hoody as i walked home,
from the night before,
i realised i had cried so many tears for the wrong person,
but i still loved who she was,
regardless,
can you tell her?
Tell her that i love her and always will,
because there is something inside of me,
that is broken,
broken like a record,
and it never stops, going around, and around,
like she was the record player,
and i was the record,
but something scratched me,
and i was never the same,
played in repeat, over and over, again,
a line sung of love, hate, misery and lust,
in a song that never stopped playing.
And now can you tell her,
tell her that i killed me to love her,
i wore my heart proudly,
bleeding on my chest,
from old battle scars and war wounds,
and tell her,
she should never be afraid to die for someone she loves,
because i want her to know,
that in the midst of all the broken pieces,
i was inside of her, outside of her, and had her,
but i never let her know,
because like a broken record,
i was stuck at the same spot from the last ride.
Can you tell her?
Tell her i think about the times she made me laugh,
really laugh til my soul fell out,
and the time she officially asked me out,
and i had no clue,
and i loved her for that
because she made it part of us.
Can you tell her,
she is missed, and loved,
and though we will never be,
she played me a song i had never heard before,
and i fell in love with her music right then.
Can you tell her?
She left a legacy, and changed the clocks when she left.
Can, you, tell her?