The art of being lonely,
Something I've perfected after years of
Screaming and pounding. The act of being
Alone, the verb of it as it trickles down your face.
I cry when I'm scared.
I cry when I'm happy too.
The word alone slips away from my cheeks,
It falls out of my mouth.
A new lover I have found in a bed that looks
Like mine, but sideways when I can't pick my head up.
I cry when I'm angry,
And the lonely clears its throat.
It pushes against
The walls of my chest like a drum, like a beat pulsating
Out of my sobs.
A new taste on my tongue,
still here,
but if I lose my mind
In my own lonely,
will there ever be anyone
Around to notice?

my therapist says, it's time you write about your psychosis
I show her a journal full of names, and some dreams
That I may or may not have had.
Inside my journal, there are pieces of my body and flowers,
There is a to-do list with nothing crossed off,
There is a hidden script for a medication I never got filled;
There are pictures over every word, disguised in a metaphor
I can't remember the language to describe.
Expression makes the most sense when you are
Expressing the bad.
This is eruption, compulsion that is combusting from my pencil and into black ink.
I point to the bugs that crawl over the page and say,
I don't have to. My psychosis is in every line.
It is in my eyes darting back and forth.
I write so much the page turns black and I have to erase it.
My psychosis is the shadow trail behind every letter.
It is the blood coming out of my mouth when I say I'll Do Better,
The scratches on my hands and feet are from holding on too tight
To demons that know how to fight back.
It is my teeth, and the holes inside of them, spit onto the page.
Spit onto the floor of my therapists wooden office.
I wince. I turn the page.
I try to say it so many times it becomes meaningless.
You wouldn't believe me if I told you.
I spit again.
My mind looks like a ******* minefield and these words are just the smoke.

I never understood when people would tell me,
“You are just like your mother.”
Always with a tone in their voice I didn’t quite comprehend.
I run back to my dad at the grocery store
After wandering through the aisles alone and he rolls his eyes.
“You are just like your mother.”
I thought he meant always getting lost and I wonder how
Many times he had to lap around the store to find her sniffing candles
With someone she hasn’t seen in five years,
Laughing like a joke shes told over and over.
See, I always thought I was like just like my dad.
We have the same eyes, and we don’t like to approach people
The way she can so easily catch an audience.
But when I make a joke a little too loud at a family reunion
My cousins laugh,
“You are just like your mother.”
I wonder what arguments she has invoked with her words.
How she has said what
No one wants to hear, but always like she picks it out
Of the middle of the air it was sitting in.
When I get upset and my ears start ringing, and I hold onto
My stubbornness like it is my last breath, my older sister tells me,
“You are just like our mother.” I figure she has better eyes to see
How shes grown,
How shes learned patience at my hands and taught to extend
Love in all directions as a choice.
Love is not always a choice, but loving yourself enough to see that you’re wasting it
Looks like my mom picking me up from my worst day and standing in
Line to buy me a milkshake as I cry in a chick-fil-a.
She told me about a story of a time she held on too tight to someone even though
She knew it was the wrong thing to do.
“I think you’re a lot like me. You always want to see the love.”
Just like my mother, I learn the hard way. And sometimes I do it more than once;
The way she will teach a nine year old how to read over and over again
Until he stops sounding it out and it rolls off of the tongue.
I know that I’m capable of sharing, of teaching, of patience,
Of honesty and love because my mother
Taught those things to me.
I think of everything I love most about myself, and all of the possibilities
For what I can become in the reflection of my mother helping me curl my hair for the prom I’m not going to.
When she needs to remind me I am quick witted, I am eloquent, I am smart, I am beautiful, I grin and say
“I am just like my mother.”

Picking up where we left off. Picking up a body from the floor.
Arms stretched.
Teeth falling like seeds to the ground.
To the dirt underneath it.
What to do with something cold:
Stare at it,
Cover it with your palms,
Die with it.
Picking up from that moment, from the place I died for the hundredth time.
I cover up my puffy cheeks,
my rotting lips cracked and
caked in chapstick.
I smoke a blunt and wipe makeup onto a sweater.
It doesn’t feel like coming
Back to life, but it reminds me of a waning moon
and looking for the brightest stars from your driveway. My hair falls out in clumps in your hands,
If you notice it is only for a second. It doesn’t hurt because
You look through me, you can see someone else in my face.
Someone without maggots crawling out of her eyes.
I die again, when you look through me. When I follow your gaze
To the gravestones behind my back.
When you tell me
“I can’t do this with you anymore” and you break my fingers kissing them goodbye;
I die then, too.
Picking up where we left off, I am a ghost hotel for your lazy mistakes.
I am surrounding myself and hiding from myself.
I carry old versions of me in a funeral precession; I drag them on the
Floor behind me as I walk. I am still more gentle with myself than
You were.
I died last week when you called, when you tell me,
“I just want to hear your voice,”
I die before I can reply.
The body knows blunt force trauma but can’t
Recognize poison until it’s too late. It bubbles out of my broken jaw
And seeps into the mud.
I pick my teeth up and put them in a pile.
I would call back but I am choking on the grief.

there is a version of me who is covered in ash.
that girl would rather jump into the fire than put it out.
there is a version of me who is scared to be
the fallout, scared to be the end of the
sentence and the last touch.
i want to hold that girl in both hands.
i want to touch that girl gently.
that girl never listened.
i want to tell her in a language she will understand:
you have been wandering through the smoke for
so long, you can't see that this is just a room. this is
just four walls of a house, with a boy and a bed drenched in gasoline.
this is just a boy, this is not a home, this is just smoke and mirrors.
there is a version of me who wanted to save him from the flames.
i want to brush the dirt from that girls forehead and hold
onto her shoulders until she stops shaking. i want to tell her in
a language she will understand:
it will always feel like this. it will always feel like gasping for
air, you never know when its safe to be yourself or when its safer to be a version he wants. it will always feel like planning an escape route you never use. why wont he open the window? why wont he let you breathe?
there is a version of me who needs someone, and i wish to God that i could cover her eyes with both hands until the pain dissipates and it is just a room once again. until it stops burning.
that girl is so brave.
that girl tried to leave so many times.
when she puts one hand on the doorknob, i want to stand behind her.
this is just an empty room with scorched walls. there is nothing
more than the nothing that is left.
when she asks. "where will i go?"
i want to whisper, "you will come home to your heart."

i make up rules for myself and then i break them.
i have spent so much time picking out seeds from my brain.
i am trying to remove the rot i planted.
i promise i will smoke less,
and drink less, and
write more.
i promise i will spend less time living inside of my brain.
i can't explain this method of self-destruction.
it is not detonating.
it is perpetual loneliness, like sand through an hourglass.
i dissolve.
a steady rain
for days.
and maybe its stylistic,
as every writer enters a page the same way,
to pour.
to let the flood cleanse your skin, to feel
relief, reborn.
i make up these rules for myself as terms for falling apart.
i am only human, i have been buried with these words
and have the grief to prove it.
i smoke too much,
i drink too much,
i haven't been able to make it out of a poem alive
in months.

the last time i saw you, you told me that there is a string connecting us. that you tug on it and hope it is still holding onto my end. that some days you feel like you have to stretch it far, so far you can pluck a eulogy out of the thread.
you wonder where i go, when you spend all day with your arms stretched out to me because you just can't quite feel me there.
the truth is, there are days where my love feels like lace around my wrists. i carry the weight evenly in both of my hands, secure by my side when i walk.
there are days where my love is tethered to the end of a kite. it circles the sky under the breath of something magical. it puts on a show, soaring and floating carelessly through empty space. these are the days we go up and down, i can't predict how the breeze will shift us, how far we will go, where we will get stuck.
there are days where my love is a spiderweb, and it curls up in dusty places and covers what is rotting in the dark. it is a trap, it is like glue, it encases all of the bad memories we've gotten stuck on until it is a grave site for what i haven't been able to forgive.
there are days where my love is a strand on your sweater that i can't stop pulling. i unravel the sleeve until i'm too embarrassed to give it back to you when you ask. these are the days where i take it too far, i want to fix things but i keep making them worse. these days, we are a pile of fiber on the floor, and i don't know where it started and where it ends. i don't know how to put us back together.
i imagine us connected by our fingers now. pulling at each other when we feel sick, or when we're far away. i realize that all of these days, i am using your string to fulfill my creative fantasies. there is only so much space between us, and i am sorry for making you
give so much line just to watch me tangle myself up in it. i am full
of knots, of nonsensical anxieties and depressive fits.
when i need it, you tie kisses in a necklace around me to make me feel safe.
some days, we give more than we take and this poem is a way of saying that
when you tug on that string, i will always be there.
whether it is up in the clouds, or in the corner of my past, or drowning in myself, i am entwined in all of this endless love.