my whole life, i have ascribed my identity to feelings
rather than concrete items and ideas.
i have been made up on abstract whim-thoughts
this presents, as you may believe, unstable ground
i would like, more than anything else, to have an idea as to the person i am.
i pick people apart like a vulture and steal their personality traits
to badly pass them off as my own.
i have no confidence that the person i am in this moment
typing this anything-but poem,
will be the person i am next year, when i forget about writing down my words and letting the world in on my secrets.
i have assigned my many fleeting names to colors, videos, a collection of short stories
but never a permanent solution
and now, i sit at a crossroad
and beg to be hit by a passing vehicle
i am a student who tries, i am an artist and a writer, i am a best friend, a girlfriend, a human being who is present in every day life.
i am not the color yellow, or the myth of the angel, i am a small girl with very tired eyes and even more tired ideas
its typical to lose sight of who you are
but i have never once had a clue as to who this soul is
i have spent most of my life pretending to be other things
feeling "real" is just as foreign as any other emotion
when theres no "real" to fall back on.
i, unfortunately, am trapped in a mind of someone who has woken from a long nap
i wander disillusioned, answering to the description of hopelessness like a nickname.
this adapted persona,
if it is, indeed, a persona,
is different in a dissociated sense.
my fear and inability to take action and base my personality off of someone else
gives me implications that,
halfway through high school,
i may finally be on a path to understanding who it is i am.
i was told that you start developing a concrete personality
at the age when you're old enough to understand words and make coherent sentences.
who would have guessed that,
at sixteen,
i am just opening my eyes and understanding words i would have previously thought so common?
if this person is who i am stuck with,
and it has taken me so long to figure it out
based on a time slowing personality disorder
i will continue to learn that i am not made up of feelings and thoughts
but up of the art of continually creating myself
and isn't a life of not knowing,
of guessing,
of trial-and-error and discovering unheard of mysteries
better than a dinner-plate life planned out in front of you?
i guess i will never know
or, maybe i will.

its taken me too long to unstitch my hands and free every thought you shuffled and stuck inside of my head

one. i think you lost me somewhere between wanting to cross miles to get to me and forgetting i exist because at some moments it feels like you worked overtime to fix the abandon architectural artwork inside of me like i was community service

two. after you came and knocked down trees and shifted the tides, every ounce of clarity was able to mirror
your whimsical efforts of drowning me out with pretty girl phrases and only calling me when you were too high to choke out my name

three. i had something inside of me that was kept under glass and i let you behind closed doors and watched you destroy it
i let you build me up with toy blocks just how you wanted me, and i let you lose interest when you decided it was more fun to knock me down and listen to the noise i made when i hit the concrete

four. the Worlds Most Fragile museum was being catered to in the holes in my chest and if i was an armoire and you opened me up your name in red pen ink would spill out of me over thousands of artifacts and priceless memories that you've bubbled over and consumed

five. even as i write this, you'd think i would find a home in an elementary classroom by the way i can barely remember how to speak
and ive got no doubt that you went out with your usual bang
and when you left you took a goodbye that never quite delivered and all of my words with you

six. my grandmother told me insects sing, for months, the same song in hopes that they will attract a mate with their repetitive soliloquies and maybe that's my hope when i tell you i love you even when you hurt me, hope that maybe one day you will pick up the phone and echo my ache with a clear, sober melody that sounds like home.

im sure the insects will find someone who enjoys their neurotic patterns and im sure i will sleep alone in an uncomfortable bed only shushing the silence as the mailcart comes by my front lawn and pauses for a second as if it empathizes with the way i stand at the door.

seven. im always waiting for a manilla package addressed to me
containing every night i spent trying to be anxiously clever and overlooking your bad judgement and the flickers across your sentences where you were forcing yourself to care

eight. every night all i receive is the crickets and a reminder that the letters that spell out your name had become my own personal hamartia before i started whispering it in my sleep

nine. ever since we met you've infected my veins like you were a deadly back alley drug and there's something so addicting about wanting to fix someone and figure them out and work for their love

ten.  if you steal my expressions and bury them in your ground and stick a wooden stake through my last words in order to make sure i only resurface when your sobriety is fully compromised, i will, as writers do, create myself a new dictionary

the act of your name will become a verb: forcing time to scrub the inside of every part of me you touched like im a sold off garage sale item and you're trying to expurgate any emotional damage that might have been done to lower my price

the way the bugs echo will become an adjective for when i am too tired to go out and pretend that my feet arent sinking into the floor

the drilled-for-oil glass museum in my heart will become a noun;  the eighth wonder of the world, and i will continue to let people destroy it and piece it back together for the sake of art

the way you left me and the ferocity of how you stole every part of me i showed you will join adverbs and Aristotle's tragedy principles among people who created their own cloudbursts.

the way i wrap everything i've wanted to say to the back of your head as you walk away into a bulletpoint essay will become my new definition for poetry and i will build myself up from the ashes i will create from your destruction, i will sing my own songs and showcase my own museums and mail my own letters and i will **continue.

ive spent my life indebted to people
like my presence costs $2.50 an hour
and the global minimum wage isn't high enough
to sit down and listen to me mumble about how sad it is that people at grocery stores artificially dye flowers to make them bluer than your eyes as if the world is a losing competition against your hands around my neck
i have not spent all my life afraid
its worse than nostalgia
and not as present as deja vu
but i used to dive off of cliffs
and fall in ignorance
but ive known since i was young
everything costs something
$2.50 an hour
a lifetime
a century
whichever comes first
i was told to be afraid
because no one wants to stick around a raincloud with no umbrella
and every word i say is fragranced with an apology
i lost the person i used to be
there was no funeral or mourning
i can't even bring myself to thank the people who dont mind getting their clothes soaked

I'd like to be your space between starting a new sentence and picking the words up from behind dusty knocked over shelves

I'd like to be abstract in the way that you can cut me apart precisely and place me in misunderstood misplaced directions and give me the power to be able to yell at the top of my lungs and call myself art

I'd like to be a thousand miles right of where I am standing because home is the breath where you gather yourself up and home is when you have to stop dancing because your laughing interferes with your drinking and home is this song over and over and over

I'd like to kiss you a thousand miles right of where I am standing but what I am boxing up and categorizing as pain is not unique

it is just pain

I'd like to erase you from me and reach inside my head to free my brain from your rose thorn words like what I need to hear is the only airsource wonder of your distorted reality

I can't tell if I want nothing to do with you or I want everything at once because love is this song and that space and the way I stop from laughing and drinking and dancing love is this homemade pain and love is this art love is every mile

love is all of these indistinguishable thoughts my pain is not profound but I will yell whether the people who have cut me apart view
me as art or not

i wanted to write you poetry but my hands haven't stopped shaking since you told me you didn't believe in love but you believed someone would one day put up with me and i can't tell whats ending and whats beginning im sure i'd like to say our relationship began last night but it would taste sour in my mouth to lie like that and i like how you say youll never grow up and you want to throw away what you have and kiss people and taste like alcohol all the time youre not realistic and your head is under water i can't even try to make myself write about you because every adjective is risky and i am on thin ice between hating you and caring too much what you think

1.) I never liked how I always felt like I was suffocating under the conviction that you were counting down the days to leaving an equation of your life that included me in the numbers and I never liked how I brushed it off under the false pretense that you were terrible at math.

2.) Every word you said was so lucid and real it felt like putting out a cigarette on my skin after asking for an ashtray a hundred times you're the one who pulled me out of my poetic dream-state so hard that I choked on condensation ice crystals from the clouds below me and now I am tied to the ground like a dog and I miss flying like that.

3.) I tasted her in the way you kissed me since the moment we met and I wanted to lock down every word I told you and erase everything that's been written for you but I didn't say anything because I was scared that I would float away without you.

4.) You came back and expected me to be fourteen and looking for someone to love me so hard that they fix me. Since your absence I had learned the hard way I don't need to be fixed. And even if I did, you would have never made a merciful god.

5.) I could sense the way you wanted control over me like a lion to its prey and feeling like I was being stalked by someone I tried to convince myself I loved was almost as exhausting as pretending I didn't notice.

6.) I was only beautiful on days you were drunk and wanted to outline the shape of my hips and I tried so hard to leave my consciousness in the other room while you never showed the decency to stay after you were finished with me because being used is better than being replaced.

7.) I shared the small things that brightened my heavy rain days with you. You made me feel like I was trying to plug in a nightlight in the middle of the dark.

8.) You devastated me and told me that's what love feels like; I still have moments of panic at sincerity and kind words seem foreign against the misery soaked syllables you broke me down and replaced me with.

9.) You did all of it because you were bored of watching the clock tick and you figured passing the time by ruining me was easier than repenting on the ways you've ruined other sad girls with cold hands.

10.) I was so used to throwing coins in the air hoping they would give me a heads or tail answer if dying would be easier than missing you forever that I didn't even notice when I ran out of money.

Maybe it's because
No one helped me up
When I scraped my knees
On pavement
And every
"not good enough"
I receive feels like
An avalanche
And I ponder
Moving words
From present
To past tense
Maybe it's because
My hands shake too much
And my mouth moves faster
Than my brain allows it to
Maybe it's because
I'm too focused on myself
And write ****** poetry
That doesn't compare
To car crash love stories
Maybe it's because
I dream about change
But hide in
Blankets and
Behind baggy clothing
Trying to find a source
of this
Unhappiness
Maybe it's because
I was dealt a ****** hand
I was treated unfairly
Or maybe it's because
I allowed myself
To take these things
And scream
About how miserable I am
Without trying
To change them