I am wrapped in my memories of you like a safety blanket,
The smoke seeping from your mouth is entangled in my hair,
Lingering in the clothes I stole from you,
Some kind of comfortable asphyxia.
The memories of us sitting on your couch,
Drowning in tears and whiskey,
Sobbing into your chest.
Soft music pours from your phone and your lips,
Old love songs I thought everyone else had forgotten,
The tv is on but I don’t know what’s playing.
The rain hits the grass in your backyard,
The wind rustles the curtain over the backdoor.
There’s a sadness there I can’t quite place.
It sits between us.
I don’t feel the pain I know is there,
Physical or emotional,
Despite the blood or the tears.
All I can focus on is your arms around me,
As we sit on the couch,
As I sob into your chest.
I feel your thumb brush against my arm,
The even rise and fall of your breathing.
It melts the pain while at the same time freeing it.
I like to remember us like that,
So small and so broken,
No hope at all,
But the love is overwhelming.
Through the whiskey and the tears,
Choking on the smoke,
Shivering with the wind.
All there is are your arms,
And your voice,
And your love.
In those memories it's enough,
To keep the sadness at bay,
Keep the pain away,
To fall asleep.

You admire pieces of me
Soft and beautiful
For the pleasure they can give you
You condemn my capability
Practicality and spirituality
You claim I can’t have it both ways
I can’t indulge my senses and hold power the same
Divine femininity has become synonymous with delusion
In a modern world that will never love me
I am aligned with the moon
I am in tune
With the rhythm of the waves
And the passage of days
You don’t know what I feel
How it is to exist in a world not built for you
Every living soul
Assigning your worth for what you can’t control
All of mankind is built on the principle
That my body was built for your enjoyment
That my life belongs to whatever man finds beauty in my eyes
And peace in my silence
Of course I turn to the tides and the trees and the breeze
To find comfort in their embrace
When you can’t hold me
You mock me for connecting to something bigger than my body
Loving Mother Nature more than the woman that brought
Me into this world
Yet you reduce my strength to beauty
Tell me I am too weak and small and simple minded
To understand a world you built
Out of fear of me
My divine femininity

The world around me has become so loud,
Drowning out the sound of my existence,
As if I don’t exist at all.
I’m still there,
Ripples in the puddles I drown in,
Whispers of wind through trees I fall from,
A rotten fruit.
I’m hidden somewhere in the Earth,
Suffocating beneath the weight of the soil and my memories.
I don’t want them to go away,
I don’t want the pain of the past to leave me,
But it’s running down my legs,
A thick red liquid,
It’s infecting my dreams,
Smothering me with smoke.
I need it to be quiet,
Let me breathe.
The dull ache I’ve spent a lifetime keeping at bay,
Chained deep within my brain,
Rising to the surface,
Screeching along its tracks as it careens towards me.
I feel so small,
So fragile,
So weak.
I can’t hear myself think.

One day I will wake up weightless,
With a steady heart,
With rested eyes that will not cry.
One day I will have only good dreams,
Free from fear,
Free from sadness.
One day my mind will be calm,
My thoughts will be good,
My hands will be still.
One day I will live to be alive,
Not just out of spite or guilt,
Not just because I feel I owe it to my mother.
One day I will be here because I choose to be,
I will want to be,
I will hope to be.
One day I will be sorry for who I was in the meantime,
One day.

I wish my existence could be as poetic as my subconscious,
As graceful,
Elegantly dancing through life,
Like metaphors on a page,
Rain filling puddles,
Mud filling cracks,
Swaying arms of willow trees.
I think that I used to be that way,
I appear to be in the hazy happiness of my memories,
But I don’t trust my mind.
I look back on a life lived in pastels,
Baby blue skies,
Blush pink cheeks,
Sage green eyes,
Lilac dreams.
It’s all daisy chains and braids,
A freckled face,
Ferns and worms,
Rolling clouds and running streams.
I wonder now if those memories are just dreams,
Did they ever really happen?
Was I ever really happy?
Or was it all just manufactured to protect me,
A safety blanket,
A quilt handcrafted by my mother?
I wonder now if my life is just an amalgamation of stolen moments,
Memories stitched together by glorified nostalgia,
Fabricated by a veil so thin,
Made entirely of imagination,
A fictitious eulogy written by me as a child to remember the life I wish I had,
A life I’ve never lived,
A tortured poet trapped in a painfully privileged portrait.
Who can I trust if not myself to remember my own life?
I grew up cold,
Stuck in the rain with a broken umbrella,
With stormy eyes and a stormy mind,
Deep greens and blues,
Scarring scrapes from the sharpest scraps of misery.
I was born in the image of hatred,
Generational distaste that I inherited,
The quietest violence,
Gentle wrath buried beneath the softest reflection.
Tell me I’m beautiful,
Oh, how sweet,
Tiny and weak.
Admire all the lies I’ve told myself to stay alive,
Hiding my agony in metaphors,
Tucking it neatly between stanzas,
A great illusion,
Fallacious lines describing a person I'll never be.

It’s raining
In this place that doesn’t rain
This place that’s made of dust
Rocky and bright
It’s raining
And I’m crying
The trees are being watered
As I am withering
Life is being given to death
Barren land
Empty scenes
And I’m dying
In the rain where it shouldn’t be raining
Rain that is not like home
Let me go home
The home that I left
The dungeon I escaped
Let me go back
I want to go back
Where pain made sense
Where rain was supposed to rain
Where tears were supposed to be shed
I want my mother to hug me while she screams
Bruises and bad dreams
I want my father to leave me while I weep
Unwilling to see
I want that pain
Anything over my vacant brain
I want to feel again
Anything
I was invisible
Forgettable
So completely free
My mind was mine
It wandered and it dreamed
Please
Put me out of this empty misery
Take me back home where nowhere feels safe
I want rain where there should be rain
Pain where there should be pain

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.

you don’t know what it’s like,
watching a person you love, love something else.
partaking in what they want,
pretending to love it too,
hiding how you really feel.
it seems justified when you see how happy it makes them.
their eyes light up with joy,
they can’t help but smile,
they wear the look you do when you think of them,
but then it fades.
not their happiness, but yours.
you feel trapped,
changed into what they want.
slowly forgetting what it was that used to make you happy,
slowly forgetting what the happiness even felt like,
so you close yourself off.
following along faithfully.
all they wanted was to share the thing they love with the person they love,
but you can’t hold on forever.
so they fall out of love with you,
seek a new person to share with,
leaving you alone,
lost.
chasing after the object of their affection in hopes to win them back.
forever distancing yourself from the person you used to be,
forever trapping yourself in the world you so desperately want to escape,
forever following hopelessly in their footsteps.

the emotion.
baseball can’t be described in words,
just like an emotion can’t be explained.

baseball is built on the principal of saying something without speaking and that actions speak louder than words.
just like double plays speak louder than walks.

baseball is eating cookies in the fourth inning to get more energy.
it’s sleeping with a mitt under your pillow and not washing your socks.

baseball is having a dented car,
it’s always parking as far away from the nearest field as possible once you’ve learned your lesson.

baseball is living off of hot dogs and coke,
it’s making fun of the little league moms who bring their own sandwiches for lunch.

baseball is a swirling, violent storm,
it’s the crack of the bat that echoes like a clap of thunder followed by a runner as fast as a lightning bolt.

baseball is the smell of dirt and sweat,
it’s the distant nostalgic aroma of sunflower seeds and Gatorade.

baseball is the stinging splinters and the scarring blisters,
it’s the feeling of scrapes and bruises on your hips from sliding.

so no, baseball can not be described in words.
it can only be described in what it does to a person,
how it influences their life.

baseball is so much more than a game,
so it’s only fitting that it never gets overlooked by describing it in words few will understand.

it can only be described in the moments that are burning secrets to those who possess them.
it can only be described as a perfect little moment in a lifetime of uncertainty,
one constant that can be counted on through the pain and happiness, the ups and downs of life.

somehow you always expect the universe to wait for you.
that the trees will stop growing and the sky will stop raining.
maybe the rivers will stop flowing or the snow will stop falling.
you wither away,
just waiting for the moment that the sky will bend to hold your hands and pull you to stand a little straighter.

you let yourself fall apart while the world moves on in hopes that it will stop.
the earth will stop spinning,
the seasons will stop changing,
people will stop leaving you behind,
wind will stop blowing away the ashes of your broken memories.
you hope against hope that the trees will weave themselves together to make you a safety blanket.
maybe the mountains will rise around you and protect you from the barrage of the outside world,
but it never does.

time goes on,
people grow older,
they grow more independent.
nothing in the universe will wait for you as you grow tired in an endless battle over your own subconscious,
an endless battle to win back the privilege to control your own life.

you find yourself lost time and time again,
wandering down an abandoned road,
caught in a sea of loneliness,
waves crashing against you as you fight to breathe and fix your life.
you suffocate with lack of authority over your own being.
your reliance on the support will be your undoing.

but still,
you blame it on those who are too busy fixing their own life to deal with your madness,
those who are already caught in their own war and let themselves suffocate to let you breathe,
leaving you behind.
a sole survivor who is waiting in line to suffocate for another,
an endless cycle of selfishness and selflessness.

blue,
the color of the ocean,
the color of the sky,
the color of intelligence,
the color of calm,
the color of a cold, depressed winter.

green,
the color of trees,
the color of nature,
the color of mischief,
the color of safety.
the color of a bright, adventurous summer.

my eyes,
a swirling combination of blue and green,
a representation of intelligence and mischief,
a source of calm and adventure,
a union of complementary opposites,
a storm of different sides of one person.

We fear Silence.
We fear the absence of sound like we fear the emptiness it fills us with.
When one fears the silence consuming them, they must only remember to listen.
Listen to the sounds that are always there, but never noticed,
Listen to the sounds that are often overlooked,
The sounds that prove to us that we are never as alone as we feel.
The sound of a plane soaring overhead.
Trains rolling along their tracks with yellow headlights piercing through a black night.
Rain falling steadily on a window pane.
Silence seems dauntingly inescapable.
It seems as if a moment too long trapped in a world of silence would be enough to forever descend in a world of loneliness.
What we don’t realize is that true silence doesn’t really exist.
We fail to understand that true loneliness is simply fictitious,
For there will always be something there remaining to obliterate the perception of silence.