I listen to male artists,
Men who remind me of my father,
And his pain,
And my pain.
I imagine they sing to me,
Protect me,
Love me,
Give me all I've never been given before,
Everything I was supposed to feel,
Everything that was supposed to show me how people work.
I listen to deep, strained voices and reflect,
Connect to things I’ll never experience.
Men are angry,
Worthy of their feelings,
Allowed to unleash their rage in screams and electric guitars and unnecessarily loud drum solos.
I listen to music sung by men,
But I also listen to Stevie Nicks,
Joni Mitchell,
Janis Joplin,
Joan Baez,
Even Dolly Parton.
Hell, even Olivia Rodrigo.
I listen to women who are angry,
Angry and still women,
Surviving through agony and still women,
“Leather and lace,”
Black clothes and black makeup,
Singing about beauty and moonlight and darkness,
Female rage.
I don't have to be at peace to be a woman,
I don't have to be happy to be a woman,
I don't have to be pretty to be a woman,
You don’t have to like me for me to still be a woman.
Let me be angry,
Let me feel pain,
Let me be lost,
Let me like the darkness,
Let me find comfort in the night,
Let me chase impossible dreams and impossible feelings,
Let me feel everything I feel.
Women are put in a box of emotions,
Too sensitive,
Too dramatic,
Too simple.
I am not sensitive or dramatic or simple,
Don't put me in that box,
Don’t tell me what I am,
Don’t tell me how to feel,
Don’t tell me what my feelings mean,
What they make me,
Don’t project your weakness onto me,
I am not weak,
I am not weak,
I am not weak.
Let me be raw and witchy and honest,
Let me be intelligent and intuitive,
Let me see more than you'll ever see in the world,
Let me be frustrated and misunderstood and just a little too loud,
Let me be a woman,
Let me be me the way I should be.

I can’t stop writing to you,
About you,
For you.
Every word in every poem,
All my ramblings,
Incoherent thoughts,
They’re all addressed to you.
Something within me thinks you’ll stumble upon them,
Find them by accident,
Wonder if it’s crazy to see yourself there.
I can promise that you are the “you” I keep writing to,
The only one I hope will read my words,
Get the words,
Feel the words,
See me through them.
I’ve been whispering my feelings,
Hiding them in metaphors,
Riddles between stanzas,
Organized neatly and subtly in the lines of my poetry.
I want to scream them.
I want them to be loud and clear and sure,
The way they are in my mind,
My heart,
My spirit.
I am so filled with love for you,
So consumed by it.
I feel like a coward for hiding behind the puzzles I fabricate with words.
I am so afraid the more I feel,
The more I say,
The less you’ll want me.
I’m so afraid that acknowledging your grasp on my mind,
Your place in my poems,
Is a reality you’re not ready to accept.
I’ve waited so patiently for the right time,
Tried so hard to find the right combination of words,
But I don’t know how I’ll live if there is no right time,
If the right words elude me.
That’s a pain I know I can’t handle,
Truthfully,
Regretfully,
Torturously,
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to.

I’ve never cared much about what I look like.
I’m not one to obsess over my appearance,
Getting my makeup right,
Fighting my hair until it looks just the way I want it.
I find it all a waste of time.
People will say you’re pretty,
They’ll admire and they’ll lust,
But they don’t care about the time it took,
The choice to use your mother’s favorite lipstick,
The story behind your best friend’s blush.
They want to stare,
Not listen,
Not even see.
I’ve stopped looking at myself without makeup,
Started going out of my way to avoid my reflection.
I don’t care what I look like,
But I can’t stand to look her in the face,
The girl I used to be.
When I can see my freckles,
How my eyelashes really aren’t all that dark,
The strange curve of my left eyebrow,
All I can see is ribbons tied to the ends of twin braids,
Daisy chains,
Eyes the color of the Starry Night.
I wonder if she’d forgive me.
I wonder if I’ll forgive myself.

Sometimes,
When I am lost or scared or sad,
I imagine my lifeless corpse,
Resting comfortably on a forest floor.
I find peace there.
I envision my hair entwined with the roots of the tree I lie beneath,
Moss and mushrooms and monkshood growing from my bare body,
Scars across my limbs dark against my skin,
So cold and pale,
Spiders crawling across the valleys between my ribs,
Hiding in the hollows of my collarbones,
Snakes slithering up my legs,
Around my neck,
Through my dreams.
I am all alone in the woods,
Bathed in moonlight and mist,
Decomposing in silence.
No one to see,
No proof of who I used to be.
I imagine melting back into the Earth,
Rain washing away what was once my soul,
Reduced to runoff,
Carried away by a violent river,
Pummeled once more by jagged rocks,
But that’s nothing new,
Sticks and stones I suppose.
There’s something so calming in the stillness of death,
Something so strangely attractive about its inevitability,
So thrilling in its inescapable grasp,
So alluring.
It’s the only thing to count on,
The only promise to be kept for all time,
The only absolute.
I think I am more afraid of life than death,
More afraid of myself than anything that could ever happen to me.
When I die I hope to find my peace lying on a forest floor.
I want to fall into eternal sleep staring at Orion and the Man in the Moon,
Their images distorted by a canopy of trees.
I want to listen to the lullaby sung by the owls and wind through the leaves.
I want to exist as whispers in the breeze and the lilies,
Haunting those who could never love me,
Immortalized by agony.

I equate the sound of harmonicas to my father’s love.
Their melancholy melody,
Shrill and somber,
So hauntingly beautiful,
Full of life and agony,
Reminiscent of the strain in his voice.
That sound pulls me tears,
Lulls me to sleep,
Passes on his pain the way he passed on the green of his eyes,
The nuance of his mind,
His taste in music.
The more time that goes by the more I listen to music with harmonicas,
Finally understanding how much that sound can hold.
There are no lyrics that could ever say more,
Speak any louder.
I hope the immortality of the music will replace the mortal love of my father,
The love that withered long before I even existed.
I hope all that he never said,
All the promises he couldn’t keep,
Will float on the notes sung by a harmonica.
Keep the tears and the fights and the absences,
The inspiration for all the ways in which I hope to destroy myself,
At bay,
Locked away in some crevice in my mind that can’t be reached,
Alive only in painful memory,
Nightmares that dissolve to whispers of words I’ll never hear.

I think I’ll always be at least a little afraid of my own reflection.
It betrays me,
Stares at me with my father’s eyes and my mother’s smile.
Taunts me, teases me, tortures me,
Forces me to face all those faces that came before mine,
All the faces reminding me that I can’t change where I came from.

My eyes are supposed to be beautiful,
Big and green and thoughtful,
Intelligent, intoxicating, inexorable.
Though I’ve never found any beauty in my father’s eyes,
I find his relentless selfishness,
His arrogance,
His stubbornness,
His refusal to help others escape the pain I know he’s always carried,
Reflected in mine.
I stare at a mirror,
He stares back,
Reminding me that green is not just a color of beauty,
But also the color of the selfish isolation I am doomed to endure.

I don’t see beauty in my mother’s smile,
I hear all the hateful words that passed her lips,
All the words screamed at me until I finally began to believe them,
Encouraging me to make myself smaller,
Make myself less me.
I picture her hovering over me,
Her grip so tight on my wrists that I can feel the bruises forming,
Her face distorted by my tears as she hisses at me,
“Cruel,” “cold,” “undesirable,” “unlovable,” “unfixable.”
I imagine her soft smile,
The same smile she wore every time she swore she was proud of me,
The same smile everyone tells me I share with her,
Sweet and feminine and classically romantic,
Twisted into the spitting image of hate and disappointment she won’t let me forget.

I wish people wouldn’t search so hard for my beauty.
I wish they wouldn’t take my face,
My features all stolen,
As a representation of my being.
The big, green, eyes,
The charming, uneven, smile,
Long thick hair and tiny, little, freckles,
Femininity, romance, perfectly imperfect to keep you interested,
Just unique enough to make you think you’d never find a replacement.
It’s all so pretty, so perfect, so pointless.
It may captivate you,
But it doesn’t tell the story of what lies beneath,
All you’d have to endure to keep it in your life.

It’s not easy to see beyond my face,
Or my attitude,
Or my wit,
All designed to intrigue.
It’s not easy to stare into my eyes and watch them fill with tears,
Watch the way my face falls,
Farther and farther from your perception of my beauty.
It’s not easy to hold slender hands when they tremble,
So violent you’d think there was an earthquake rattling around in my mind.
It’s not easy to trace the outline of my figure when I’ve become too thin,
The valleys between my ribs,
The sharp ridges of my hips are too scary.
I may be easy to look at,
So easy to admire,
But I am not easy to love.

I ache for the love of which I have been denied for so many years.
I want to be beautiful for all that I’ve endured,
All that I carry with me,
The pain I’ve felt,
The stories I’ve collected,
All the broken pieces of old versions of me that I’ve slaughtered on my own accord.
I want you to think that I am beautiful even though I can never accept it.
I want you to still think that I’m beautiful when my skin is ripped to shreds,
Torn by the blade in my own hands,
When my eyes are sad and empty,
When my smile eludes you.
I want you to still think that I can be beautiful.

I am so tired of bleeding my soul for people who just want to look at me,
So sick of letting people in who find everything beneath the surface of my face ugly.
I am so much bigger than my body,
So much more beautiful than my face,
But it will never matter.
People will always praise my father’s eyes and my mother’s smile,
The traits glued to me that bleed into my mind,
Infect my soul with all of their hatred and anger and disgust.
People may always call me beautiful, but just once, I want someone to find my beauty to be more than skin deep.

When I was a child,
Watching a wayward world through a lens of wonder and possibility,
Bound to an unusual captor of bats and gloves,
Reaching towards the rest of my life,
Over the head of the life I was already living,
I fell in love.
Not with a person or an object,
Nothing but a symbol of everlasting youth.
A team,
A place,
A game,
It was baseball.
Not just the game but everything that accompanied it,
A family,
Brothers becoming brothers.
A world,
The smells of trees and rain and concession stand hotdogs,
The sounds of a ball thudding into a catcher’s mitt and cheering fans,
The tastes of early morning Starbucks and corn nuts and bubble gum,
All of it stuck between basepaths,
Sitting on a bench in a dugout,
Spilled on the seats of my father’s car.

All of these little things,
All of the memories,
Just moments passed,
Lost in the depths of my mind,
Taunting me as I wish to return to them.
Although not yet old, I am older,
Reminiscing on the good and the bad of my youth.
I can still remember the veil of paralyzing loneliness,
Pierced by the family found in my brother’s team.
I remember the tears shed as I watched my father devoting his life to that team.
Those bad times were outshined by the good,
Team dinners in faraway towns,
Sunsets over outfield scoreboards,
Driving back to hotels in the dark with the windows down and classic rock blaring.
This is the way that I grew up,
Lonely but free,
Unhappy but secure,
In love with a thing that took so much from me,
Lasting Stockholm Syndrome bleeding from my life as it was to the life that I have.
I have lost this love,
No longer experience the ups and downs that can only be described as the reality of life.
I cannot weep over this lost love,
Cannot wallow,
Knowing that this is how it must be.
I must let go,
Grow up,
Get old,
Move on away from the family I found and the world I discovered,
Life doesn’t slow until it stops,
Barreling towards a hollow canyon,
Disappearing over a cliff to be covered by fistfuls of dirt,
Watered by the tears of loved ones left behind.
I must leave my love to rest before I lay in that hollow canyon.

Why must we grow up?
Grow out of our innocence and naivety, careless inexperience?
Why must we take for granted the memories of our youth?
Where do we retrieve them when our age returns to us and we miss the forgotten beauty of the world through a child’s eyes?
I wish the softness of the summer breeze would return to me,
Find me again in my days of regret,
In the sea of sorrow following me from my youth,
Sending waves crashing over my head.
I am not yet old, not yet wise,
But still, I mourn the loss of days past,
Loss of sweet summer softness,
Of the relentless rain ruining the chances I had of forgiving my father.

I have forgiven him since.
I forgave him like I forgave myself,
Regretfully.
I often miss that swirling storm of emotions I felt,
The loneliness, the worthlessness, the heart sickness.
So young and so filled with pain, balanced only by the Children of the Sun radiating from my chest.
Views of the maple-*******, the leather-launcher, the grenade-catcher,
Smells of earth and freedom,
Sounds of gentle violence, drawn-out intellectualism,
Overwhelming my senses and filling my days.
Those memories will follow me into the reaper’s grasp,
Rest with me in my eternal cradle.
Despite the storm, the pain, the sickness,
I dream of that cradle where the memories, the bitter and the sweet, will come together in the storm,
Meet like lightning and thunder,
And follow me into peace.
I am not yet old, but I long to be,
To once again feel my love and its infinite reach.