My keyboard makes music out of my tears
With ever fear I feel and every smile I bring
With the madness that takes me
With the rage I sing

Like she once said
It's not easy to read to them what's in my head
So we write it instead...
While we grip to our beds

I'm stuck okay,
I don't need to tell them how deep I'm in this
Rapid fire, dancing liars, a choir of fire
I couldn't get shyer, my pleas will be dire

With my sensitivity
My emotions exploding
My complicated thinking
My heart that's bleeding

You know what...fudge it
I try and I cry and I even ask why
But when does it matter
I know we all feel the weight...










But why do they diminish what makes my soul ache
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But its okay

I don't have much else to say

I'm going to continue to play the silent game

I see no darkness

I hear no bitterness

I speak nothing heartless

Evil does not run me

Why let it run them?

“I’ll get over you”
I whisper to myself through the nights
memories haunt me
and your voice that taunts me.

But there are tears on my pillow,
tears on the ground.

My tears flow like the ocean,
dripping in slow motion,
scraping my skin
and bringing me down to my knees.

I find myself turning into a storm,
howling like the wind.
Clutching my heart
as though it was ripped apart.

I am unable to escape from the pain and ache
The constant search for your face
in the passing cars and soaring clouds.

My breath is stolen and gut twisted
at the sight of someone similar to you,
face turning to the side your name is called.

When will these feelings end?
When will I escape
from the shadow
that lurks in my mind and heart?

The loss that ran deep,
breaks open through resonating heartbreaking songs.

But I know the pain will wash out
and you will leave me
like a distant memory.

I’ll pick myself up
and won’t be feeling blue.
I know I’ll find love again
if I start loving myself.

I envied the cadavers haunting my nightmares,
watching those before me
spread upon a metal slab
bodies are hand-me-downs of regurgitated poetry,
with wretched closets in which I take their place.

This ventilator called "loved ones"
forcing breath into anguished lungs-
tragedies belonging to these poets meant something,
a desire to save the words written,
but never the one who becomes a eulogy.

Agony burrows inside of me,
conversations with my mother's ghost
still,
the living are possessed by
the dead's shortened tomorrows.

To die by suicide wouldn't give,
authenticity to hurt.

I am learning the autopsy of a soul:
extracting a heart from the chest,
as it's sense of belonging was never there.
An inability to weigh the words bleeding from valves,
aside lungs I'm unable to breathe through.

How ungrateful is it of sorrow to ask for hope?
placed in a pill divider to swallow,
muscles within my throat so tight.
Wondering,
How many times did I diminish my voice?

Inside the brain,
schematics of labyrinths with no end to betterment.
Surgeons reach for a soul,
an iridescence small enough
held in a gloved palm,
watching it writhe.
Placed upon a slide,
but even a microscope
cannot perceive the pain a soul hides.

Once more,
stitched with needle and thread.

Wilting of my own garden,
comes one day-
an incision is made opening me up.
My heart showed the same
blood-red ink, writing apologies
on the marble floor.

They opened my arm,
displaying a noose of veins.
In this moment,
they removed my soul
only to gift it to another
birthed from torment
ripped out of the arm's of their mother
& into the embrace of woe.

—V.H.