i took pictures of everything i found pretty and maybe that’s why i had a million photos of you but there was never one of me

hungry and wanting,
our bodies move in the rhythm that we have learned to master in the short years of loving one another.
skin on skin,
uneven and shaky breathing,
fingernails clawing into your back,
your hand around my throat.
our bodies collide in an all too familiar fashion,
but the feeling is still so new and so fresh,
every moan that escapes our lips feels like the experience of watching the sun dip into the horizon,
beautiful and colorful and wild.
i don’t think any poem will remaster what we do behind closed doors,
but every word escaping my pen will try to tell the story of loving you touch by touch.

i've found myself swerving off the road when the sun is setting.
when splashes of orange, pink, yellow spray across the summer sky my eyes wander away from the road and i'm lost in the color.
i've risked my life just to catch a glimpse of heaven's painting, and i think that's how it is every time i look at you.
i chase sunsets like i chase you,
always wanting to see more of you and not being able to stop myself.
you're as beautiful as a sunset,
and i'll keep chasing you until i crash.

the scars on my skin will linger on my body like the stars in the clear night sky,
lighting up a blank canvas until the sun finds its way back to hide it.
but the like the stars,
my scars will always be there,
masked only by a light that will eventually die out.

you throw up just to rinse your mouth out with another beer.

tie me to the bed and have your way with me. 
touch me, kiss me, bite me, **** me. 

have your way with me. 

love me hard enough that every demon taking home in my mind flee in search of another lost soul. 

because with you, i am not lost.
touch me, kiss me, bite me, **** me. 

find poetry in every flaw on my skin,
but make them seem beautiful as your lips trace the scars.
with you, i am not lost.
breathe life into me as your fingers dig into my hips,
causing sparks as our bodies meet.
our tongues will intertwine,
and with every kiss all catholics will turn in their graves.
have your way with me.
love me hard enough that the world stops turning,
and there is only us left in this place.
touch me, kiss me, bite me, **** me.
find poetry in every curve of my body.
enough so that every poet becomes green with envy.
have your way with me.

you told me i needed fixing but you didn't tell me how so you grabbed me by the throat and lifted me up but when you realized that I was too hard to carry you dropped me and shattered me even more

i'm not perfect but i hope i'm still perfect for you, am i still perfect for you?

I will chain smoke cigarettes until I can't breathe, cry until I pass out, or **** until I'm bruised, but I will never again take a blade to my skin.

you don't even bother trying anymore.

they ask you what your greatest fear is,
expecting you to say
the dark
death
falling in love
but no one ever expects the word "myself" to escape from your lips.
they ask you what your greatest fear is,
but no one ever expects you to touch the white lines trailing up your arms,
to touch the scar on your collarbone,
the result of the blade slipping when your hands were too shaky to take it across your neck.
they ask you what your greatest fear is,
but no one ever expects you to say that you're terrified of what your own mind could trick you into doing.

i'm trying my hardest to reconnect with old flames,
but it's nearly impossible when they either only talked to you because they wanted to *******,
or decided that finding another high was more important than holding onto a friendship.
i can't count all the friends i lost on one hand,
the sad reality that people do leave,
no matter how often they tell you they'll stay.
i'm trying my hardest to reconnect with old flames,
but nobody wants anything to do with me anymore.

i'll love you until the universe decides i shouldn't

sometimes i miss you,
but then i realize that i was just an awful person to be friends with,
as were you.
i never kept stories straight,
afraid to tell the truth about my family after i opened up to you and you judged me,
so then i tried to keep quiet.
but it just resulted in things i could never explain well enough for you to understand.
i don't miss the person you are.
you are damaged,
and toxic,
and lost,
but i am too,
and maybe two toxics cant be mixed.
i don't miss the person you are,
i miss the memories,
and being able to call you a best friend,
but i don't miss you.
the more days past,
the more i wish it wasn't you who i shared all the memories with.

At the age of 16, I promised myself I’d never get addicted.
I swore to myself that not one thing could drown me in the ocean that is addiction, but at age 18, I shattered the promise into pieces.

Growing up, the smell of cigarette smoke escaping my mom’s sweaters always made me sick to my stomach,
but as soon as sadness found me at the age of 16, it whispered in my ear to find the addiction in nicotine.
I found myself sneaking into the garage to steal cigarettes out of half full packs,
blowing smoke out of my window at the Devil’s hour.
And at age 18 I replaced the stolen packs of cigarettes with bought packs of Marlboro Blues.
The packs sit at the bottom of my purse, the smell masked by over usage of perfume,
the addiction hidden by me telling everyone who loves me “I don’t like it anyway.”

Growing up with an alcoholic father, full of terrifying nights wondering whether or not I’d see him come home after the bar,
I swore to myself I’d never drink any sort of alcohol,
but that was soon broken when I found the bottle of wine no one wanted to drink,
and the forgotten beer cans nobody from my family drank at a birthday party.
I drowned it all, and for that second I understood why my father could want this addiction so much.
The burn was a numbing experience, and I found more relief in shots of mixed liquor and blackouts than any therapy session.

There’s no “growing up” story with the blade, with the cutting, with the self harm.
Maybe I was always fascinated with blades. Maybe I was drawn to it. Maybe I liked the idea of it,
but becoming addicted to dragging a blade across my skin was never something I could imagine.
When the knife first drew blood,
a part of me thought the waterfall of crimson was beautiful,
trailing down my arm in a river of red,
dropping into a puddle like raindrops on a stormy day.
The blade cut through skin as easy as pen on paper,
and I promised myself I would never become addicted,
but the faded white lines on my arms tell a different story.

I remember meeting you,
I remember telling myself,
“****, you’re *******,”
because even if I did promise myself never to become addicted to anything,
I easily became addicted to you.
But you,
you weren’t toxic like every other thing in my life.
You were the sunshine through storm clouds,
hazel eyes sparkling when you talked about something you love.
But it wasn’t how you talked about the items in your life that made me become addicted,
it’s how you light up when talking about me.
It’s how your eyes look before I kiss you,
full of not only lust but so much love,
a love that is so foreign to me I can’t find myself to ever want to stop kissing you.
It’s how you kiss my hand, or my forehead,
or sing in the car when I’m not okay.
It’s how at home I feel in your arms,
and maybe that’s cliche,
but if this is addiction,
then I never want to be in rehab.

you know that feeling when you find new music & you absolutely fall in love with it?
or maybe that excited feeling while waiting in line before a concert?
how every part of your body just fills up with this adrenaline,
sparks that make you not be able to stand still,
a feeling that you never want to stop feeling.
that's exactly what it feels like to love you, to be in love with you.
that feeling, all the time. & I don't want it to go away.

I don't want to tell you that I love you.
The word "love" terrifies me.
The concept of it tears me apart from inside out, piece by piece.
How could such a small word mean so much?
I don't want to tell you that I love you because I see so much heart break,
but when I take your hand in mine,
as it envelopes the hand that once held a blade to skin,
the feeling that surges through every part of me must mean something.
I've felt the sparks of lust before,
but when your lips press onto mine,
the first thought in my mind that invades my mind isn't to tear your clothes off.
My mouth spreads into a smile across yours,
and the next thing I know I'm pulling you closer to me with the fear of losing you.

it's not the self harmer tucked safely away in the back of my mind that wants to crawl back into the familiarity of old habits.
it's the blade stolen from my father's tools, traces of dried blood still gleaming.
it's the bandaids kept in my desk drawer, there if needed.
it's the marks on my neck from rough ***, a pain that sparked the craving for a different distraction back into my body.
it's the fact that i'm never told the truth, my life fueled by lies for years on end that just need to be forgotten about.
it's the racing thoughts,
"he'll leave you"
"he'll find someone better"
"he doesn't even love you, it's a lie"
"you're nothing to him, to the friends you think you have"
"everything she says isn't a joke, it's all the truth but you're just too ******* dumb to realize it"
running on repeat in my mind each and every night like a broken record.
it's the lack of sleep where the loss of blood could take the place of the pills that stopped working months ago.
it's not the self harmer that craves the blade again,
she just brings it out to the open.

I can scream from the top of my lungs at the highest point in our city,
where my voice will echo throughout the buildings,
"I love you" bouncing from east to west,
and right back to us,
wrapping themselves around the teenage bodies that hold angst, and lust, and love,
but most importantly hope,
the hope that taught me life was worth the late night fights from parents who need a long overdue divorce,
it's worth the headaches masking the buried worry that sits deep in my chest,
it's worth the tears that shed late at night when the demons come out to play only be wiped away from you.
it's worth it all,
because I know you'll be there to make me smile when there's nothing to smile about.

there are no words, no combination of letters to explain the feeling that sparks through my body when you touch me.

there isn't a way to explain my love for you, to explain the sense of calm that washes over me just when a smile dances onto your lips.

a thousand different novels can be written about your kiss but not one will fully explain how much you mean to me.

I used to think I was temporary.
in people's lives, in relationships, in everything.
I used to think I was as temporary as the flowers who only stay on the trees for a couple of weeks- beautiful, but only for a second.
beautiful & loved, but only until I fell apart, fell down.
I'm blooming again, but I don't want to be temporary.
I want what I become after the beauty passes to be as loved as it was before.
I can't do temporary anymore.
I need permanent.

love is a four letter word that has always terrified me.
it has been replaced with other four letter words-  "lies" and "gone",
harsh words with harsher meanings buried underneath the gentleness of love.
but when I look at you,
I know that "love" is more than just a word.
I know that it doesn't hold nightmares behind its sweet exterior.
I can look at you and see myself loving you for forever,
and maybe forever is too long,
and maybe forever is more terrifying than a four letter word could ever be.
maybe you can't see forever when you look into my eyes,
but I see forever with just one smile of yours.

February  12 2016
loving someone can fill your stomach with killer bees,
have your fragile little heart be held by someone else ,
and tear the walls down you thought would never fall.

but loving someone can also replace those bees with gentle butterflies;
the slight flutter it does when he smiles at you.
it can make you trust enough to have him hold your heart in his calloused hands;
trust him enough to not crush it into a million little pieces.
it can make you take the hammer that you usually took to your skin, and knock down the walls you surrounded yourself with;
tear them down enough to let him look at even the darkest parts of your soul.

love can teach you that even if you hate every inch of yourself,
he will find beauty in every flaw.
he will kiss the self hate away,
squeeze you hard enough that every broken piece of you will slowly come back together.

love teaches you that it doesn't even matter what you look like naked,
the only thing that matters is tearing each other's clothes off and losing yourselves in each touch,
each scratch,
each kiss.

it will teach you to be okay with crying in front of another person;
your pillow doesn't have to be the only thing that listens to you when your demons come out to play at 3am.

*love can teach you that everything you hated about yourself,
could somehow be loved by another.

January 21 2016
there's never a day where I don't think about you.
because it's you, you, you.
I can't go a day without thinking about your lips on mine.
it'll always be you.
*and I'm so ******* sorry I can't show you how much I'm in love with you.

January 31-February 10 2016
*because they're all the same ******* thing in the end.

(January 30 2016)
"should we blame it on the mental illness or the addiction?"
*you have to be a little messed up in the head to fall into addiction.
so it's okay to blame both.

I was fighting a war with my mind, I made a blade my weapon & my skin became the battlefield.

I tried to tell myself I can't love another before I can find love in my own body,
but your smile was too bright,
and I knew the butterflies in my stomach weren't towards my chipped black nail polish and sad brown eyes.

I gave you my heart but instead of taking care of it as you would yours,
you smashed it to pieces so all I was left with was a broken heart and an empty chest.

I remember the first time she was put in jail when I was a teenager.
I was in the psyche hospital twenty minutes out of town,
an out patient facility,
trying my hardest to stop my mind from telling me to rip my skin open.
my dad picked me up that day dressed in his court clothes,
and my mom wasn't with him.
I was expecting that the entire day of course,
but I still broke down when we got into the truck.
my dad and brother work third shift,
and when I started painting a bottle red and slicing it up with a knife,
he called into to work to stay with me for the night.
it was more of his fear of me slicing my skin open instead of the red bottle, than him just keeping me company.
the second time she was put in jail,
I don't even remember it from all the pills I took to numb myself.
I don't remember why she was there,
and I don't remember how the nights felt without her.
today when the cop called me,
I was almost certain she finally crashed her car or took too many pills.
the cop told me she was arrested,
and asked to speak to my father.
the last few weeks between me and her were not good,
you'd think I was being abused if I told you the things she said to me and vice versa,
and who knows,
maybe I was.
now she's going to be in jail for who knows how long,
and the guilt and the regret weighing on my shoulders,
gripping my heart so tight it's hard to breathe,
makes me wish I could hurt myself again,
but what kind of person would I be if I hurt myself when I told you not to?

sad, sleepless, lonely nights are not my friend.
I suppose putting the painful thoughts on paper could do wonders for my mind,
but no poem can make my demons disappear.
sadness comes in waves, and if I don't get thrown a life vest soon,
the waves will swallow me whole, pulling me under piece by piece until I'm nothing of a shell of a human body who once could fake a smile.
making a pen bleed out my words is better than a blade bleeding them from my wrist,
but the thought still consumes me.
I'm terrified that one of these days the blade will grab hold of me
and there won't be any turning back. one of these days,
the blade won't just trace my skin in a desperate attempt for crimson,
it will dig in
and I'll just be another scar.

I want it to hurt,
and maybe if I wish hard enough,
it will.

maybe if you love me hard enough we could be as beautiful as the sky

I'm so not okay.
stop forgetting all the nasty things you tell me,
like "*******" or "selfish *****".
I'm so not okay.  
my throat is dry because I can't cry and my stomach is sore because I can't eat.
I'm so not okay.
I want someone to love me, but the only thing I am to another is a *** toy.
I'm so not okay.
I'm an entire year behind in school and I have to fake being all right to make sure I finish all my classes before next year.
I'm so not okay.
maybe another bruise or another cut would make me okay.

another explicit photo to boost your self confidence,
another cigarette to fuel the craving of another person's lips on yours,
another breathy ****** to pretend that you matter.

maybe burning away your name on paper will burn away the memory of you in my head.
my hair will swallow the smell of smoke as if the thought of you burned away in my brain.

she was someone you didn't want to stop looking at.
you had to pay attention to her, or you would feel like you were missing something.
you payed attention to how she read a ragged old novel with a title you never heard of,
how she gripped it so hard, her fingers turned white that you almost couldn't see the tattered cuticles that surrounded the black nail polish of her nails.
how she held a cigarette delicately, taking in long drags as she lifts it to her mouth.
how when she was outside, the sun changed her hair color so much you couldn't even tell what it really is.
you payed attention to her smile, her laugh, her eyes as they met yours, crinkling as you tell her something funny.
you payed attention to how her hand felt in yours,
a tight grip as if she never wanted to let go, forever wanting to be yours,
but her hand always let go,
and when your hand was empty,
you realized she never was yours to begin with.
but you never wanted to stop looking at her.

I was always told to not fall for the broken boy, but look where I am again. I've fallen for yet another piece of broken glass and I'll end up bleeding, getting cut up on his pieces, but there isn't a way for me to stay away.

most girls always have something simple and silly they're attracted to in a guy. their last names all start with S, they all have green eyes, brown hair. while I'm attracted to shattered. broken. lost.

maybe it seems like we both could put each other back together, but it's not that easy. this isn't a John Green book, a tumblr post, we both can't hug each other tight enough that our pieces will stick back together.

because guess what? they're sharp. and we're gonna get hurt.

sometimes I want the blade other times I want you because honestly *what's the difference

to the self harmer holding the blade, wanting nothing more but for it to kiss flesh, know that you've been days clean and you don't deserve another scar.

to the self harmer digging your nails into your thigh after a fight with your parents, know that this storm will pass.

to the self harmer shaking as you bury countless blades in the dirt, know that you've never been as strong as you are now.

to the self harmer hiding deep under your skin, know that your scars are nothing more than a reminder that you're still alive.

to the self harmer rocking the realest smile you have had in weeks, you made it.

I want to write you terrible poetry about the way you look at me,
and paint you pictures of your favorite things that leave a sparkle in your eye.
I want you to hold my hand with the thought of never letting go because you're scared of what could happen if you did.
I want you to read me your favorite passage from your favorite book,
and let me just listen to your voice as the words fall from your lips.
I want you to touch me in the places where I fell for someone else but they didn't catch me, and kiss me, whispering on my lips that you'll never drop me.
I want you to want me as much as I want you.

you told me you loved me the best  when I was at my most vulnerable stage,
so I put you between my thighs,
and let you love me as hard as you could.

You're a hickey on my neck,
bruised and red,
marking your territory,
refusing to fade.

No swallow of a prescribed pill,
no inhale of sickly sweet nicotine,
no drowned shot glass,
will make me forget the pain that latched its way onto my skin
when you left without a warning.

your body is my coffin
and I wouldn't mind being buried six feet under

my favorite sound is the sound of the sharp intake of breath you take,
as my lips move from yours to the outline of your collarbone and lower,
tracing every inch of you as if you're a map and my mouth is the pen,
just finding another route to travel on.

who knew turning seventeen meant losing another best friend to drugs.

who knew another birthday meant losing another best friend just because finding the next high was more important that I ever was.

who knew the older I get the more people leave me without saying goodbye.