It's so easy to romanticize,
slipping on that cloak
of self-loathing;
Reminiscing on those failed dalliance days.
You make me think of what might be
If I could have been someone else,
making me lonely for a rewind
back to before my trajectory slid.

I'm just one of those
tortured people
who leaves their mind on
like a light.

The night is cloudy and the stars don't shine,
The raindrops on the window are illuminated by the cold street light.
Perhaps I would be able to hear the roaring wind
but it is silenced by the tick tock of the clock on the wall.

Maybe, maybe I will write again,
Maybe, maybe I will learn to play a happy tune,
One day I'll forget elegies
And stop making these melacholy effigies

I don't really like rhyming now,
They sound too happy and are sometimes cheap.
I rather write to my poems and say, "Thou
art my biggest mystery, you're too shallow. You're too deep."

So in conclusion,
I don't know why I'm writing.
All I know in this confusion
Is that the night is cloudy and the stars don't shine,
The raindrops on the window are illuminated by the cold street light.

The clock is ticking. Tick. Tock.
The people are hollow,
The people are stuffed
leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw.

Words
Can hardly even scratch the surface of my sorrows
Words
Could never fix the aching in my heart
Or repair the damage I've done to myself
Or heal the broken parts of me
Words
Flood my mind like ocean waves
Spilling out my eyes in salty streams
Causing a pounding pressure in my head
Like a heart that I wish would stop beating
Words
May never fully express the apathy blossoming in my body
Or convey the suffocating emptiness I'm left alone with
Or ease the anxiety dancing through my veins
Words
Are just letters
And letters
Are just symbols that we throw together in attempts to bring meaning to something
So how could words
Possibly
Help me

I sit alone on the floor,
the light blinks in and out.
...or perhaps it is my eyes?
that I cast now over leftwards
to look at the doorway.
Empty, as it always is,
or is now? as it should be.

I feel as though I am floating,
no, I am grounded now.
Chained here to the floor.
My body lays like bones in the ground,
unmoving and crushed by dirt.
heavy and cloying, the smell of earth.
worms dig under my skin,
wriggling parasites in my skull.

Am I decaying? like I once wished.
my thoughts like rot, what else...
but to deteriorate into darkness.
My body lays on the floor,
a useless cadaver as it always was.
I am strung to it by some means,
my ghost lingering on the dead.
Have I not moved on yet?

I cry these days
When I read positive news
Something shatters in me
And I think it is hope
Apathy has become a bedfellow
An unwanted lover loitering nearby
I feel myself falling apart, alone
My eyes find dark space
Settling there, trying to disappear
My bones grinding into the ground
Until rooted fingers born from their shavings
Grip my lungs, squeezing tighter and tighter
And my life screeches from chapped lips

I've never told you,
But I've loved you for years.
I know you don't feel the same,
But I always hoped that somehow
You would fall in love with me too.

I never minded waiting
Just being around you was enough,
But these days, you've become so distant
I wonder if you even care at all.
Even when I was drowning in my own darkness,
I answered your calls and listened to every problem you had.
And then, when I needed someone, I reached out to you,
But you ignored every single plea for help.

Now, my heart is slowly dying
And I don't know how to stop it or who to tell.
With its final fading beats it clings to my love for you,
But even that is slowly fading.
And somehow, I feel it's all my fault.

“  Don’t ask me how I’ve been
unless you’re prepared.

Truth is, I haven’t been great, but that’s
predictable.   “

I’m not even looking at her anymore.
Just staring at the ceiling, this deadpan expression carved into my stone face.

She asks me if I need anything.

I just laugh.
Bitter, cruel.
This is past the breaking point.

“  No, no.
It’s too late.

You’re too late.  “

Lounging, today, on Your back porch
I saw America's men
Holding their tiki torches
Toward all they had been

I saw all of America's men
Wade angrily out into the icy upper bay waters
Toward all they had been
Through the tears of their mothers and daughters

Wading out into the icy waters
Holding their tiki torches
Through the tears of their mothers and daughters
Lounging, half-drowned, on Lady Liberty's back porch