If you love someone tell them;

If you love yourself, say that as well.

She told me "when you love you give your all" and I don't know if that is good or bad. You see eventually I will have given every piece of me away but I'm hoping she's the last one and I hope I can say forever like I truly mean it, but that's the thing I never know when someone's is being sincere. She said "you live in the moment but your slowly falling to pieces. You can't live on the hope that it will be okay you have to know it will be"

i don't watch home movies
hate them
reason being because
when i was young
i was looking for a movie
my mother
had recorded for me
and accidentally
put one in the vcr
that i'm not sure
i was supposed to see
i know the obvious response
"uh oh, ****"
sorry to disappoint
they were only marked with dates
  1991
on live television
montel williams asks my father
"how can you just throw
your child away like a piece of trash?"
   1994
i spend so much time
in the emergency room
that my parents stop
penciling in growth marks
on the frame
of my bedroom door
i always thought
it was because they believed
i would never grow out
of this sickness
sometimes i believe
the reason that they
never bought me a dream catcher
was because they never thought
i'd live long enough
to see them come true
   1996
i am eliminated
from a spelling bee
because i didn't know
the 'dad' is silent in 'family'
   2013
before i got into poetry
i used to do standup
none of my jokes were funny
one of the other comics
tells me my skits are dry
sometimes sad
he says "why don't you joke
about something like your family?"
so i say
"i never wore any sunblock
because i didn't want anything
to keep me from my father"
i say "what do you call christmas
without lights or heat?"
before he has a chance
to answer
i say "1997. better yet
why don't you
make like a dad and
leave"
   2014
every time we drive
past the hospital
my mother reminds me
how much it cost to save my life
like she'd rather
have her money back
she doesn't have to say
that sometimes she wishes
it was me who had died
instead of my brother
i can hear it in the way
she says "love you"
sometimes i imagine
that if i were to die
that she
would pick out a casket for a child
because she never loved
the person i became
yesterday i told my father
how close i'd been
to suicide lately
and he said
"that's my boy,
livin on the edge.."
and i can't remember
if i laughed
or cried

01:52 am
have you ever asked yourself like why you so lonely?*

01:53 am
or empty?

that maybe you give too much of your essence to people and never leave any of you for yourself

01:55 am
i know i do

02:05 am
and like that's maybe why i get so attached to humans

because in them,
i find myself

02:07 am
i need to change, because things shouldn't be this way

02:10 am
but it's hard sometimes you know, when most days you don't leave the house because you feel unworthy of the space you take up

02:16 am
so you'd much rather disintegrate into soil because you've become all too familiar with people stepping over you and admiring the outcome of your beauty but never the roots of your pain

02:19 am
i spend so much effort watering people in order for them to grow and hardly get enough sun shine to feed my own soul

02:25 am*
because i don't know how to do anything else but care for everyone but myself

It's hard to write a poem
When there's nothing going on
It's hard to think of what to say
When you've given most of it away

As poets we never scratch the surface
We delve within, disclose our deepest sin
We crave our pain, declare it's for our art
Yet more often than not have no idea where to start

But start we do and start we must
A deep desire in all of us
To spill out on the written page
What little bit we have tried to save

Ink now is the poets blood
Fragments of self pour from within
Silence is our safety net
To stop us from bleeding out

Although it's hard to write a poem
With nothing going on
We still find words to form a verse
From deep within our marrow bone

Work © Mike Hauser & © Sia Jane

my pills smell like a hospital
this bookstore smells like my grandma
the faint reminiscence of old memories
cloud the only five senses I own.
I start to wonder if this life is becoming idle
if this IV lining my arms is broken again.
If I have enough will to stay.
These pills smell like a hospital-
and I'm worried you will find me there someday
withered from this world I can't tolerate enough to stay.
But these pills seem to help me stay.
Remind me why I'm alive-
this smell reminds me to stay away.
When the blade calls my name I don't listen anymore
when you call my name I don't listen anymore
I've been seeing your face too often
and not hearing my own voice enough.
I start to think nostalgia and you share the same interests
like you both started a google drive document
and shared the file with me and now it's all I see.
You can edit my life for me
and no matter what I continue to write
you change the font
and reformulate my sentences.
I wish I didn't exist.
Then I smell my grandma in this empty bookstore
and feel the pages against my fingers again.
I'm here whether I like it or not.
You were here whether I like or not.
Paying too much attention to madness
and not enough to bliss
I take up too much time thinking
and not enough doing.
25mg isn't enough anymore
and each time the clock strikes 9
my mind likes to contemplate quitting you.
But I smell the hospital again
convince myself to stay away from that place.
The pill hits my tongue and travels down my throat.
I don't think anymore.
I don't want to know.
I am home-
here in this bookstore
with the smell faintly touching my nostril
with the pills lining my nose
with you writing me apology notes
that sound too **** familiar.
I wish to erase you from my retinas.
I don't want to see you anymore.
I hoped these pills would help-
but they make things more clear for me.
You're face has been all I see
now I seem to be losing me
where did I go?
where am I again?
why are you the only face I recognize?

oh, my god,
stop praising little girls for being "tiny" and "slender" and "willowy"
for being skinny.

because the scale offers validation
and eating cheetos and twizzlers and cookies and candy without gaining a pound becomes an accomplishment
a sharp and boasting laugh
ha, ha! i can eat all the **** i want
and still be /skinny!/

because a girl will feel pride
in her ballerina legs and bony joints
and guilt
in her best friend wishing she were as small.

because "skinny" stops being an adjective
and becomes a definition.

because being skinny becomes
owning stacks and stacks of size zero jeans
but ******* and shimmying and squeezing your *** into them
(god forbid you buy a size two.)

skinny becomes looking flat in the midsection
but only if you eat triscuits for lunch that day

becomes seeing the outlines of individual ribs
but grabbing with a grimace the layer of fat and skin that covers them

becomes standing with legs spread apart and back tilted and eyes squinted
and looking maybe kind of like a forever 21 model,
until you sit and your thighs melt into huge endless expanses of tissue

becomes avoiding the bathroom scale because you told yourself two years ago you'd never get above double digits.

becomes knowing that most girls would **** for your body, or for the absence of your body - for the carved out spaces where flesh could be.

becomes feeling guilty, feeling ridiculous, feeling ungrateful
becomes never admitting to anyone that you feel anything but skinny.