Your 4-month-old kitten got stuck in the hollowed out tree
Half a mile into the woods behind your home
The one where you used to stash old
Board games and magazines
He died on top of a stack of TV guides
Overnight

You get used to leaving more things unsaid
With each appraisal of the stones you
Mean to leave unturned
How the quiet moments in the margins of the night
Dry up in reverse burgeoning
And you fear them shriveling to show
The insulation beneath;
You wish you were more cynical of the outside world,
And more trusting of those close to you.
Aside from the hope you stockpile
In hidden shrines between your synapses,
Silence invites nothing worth fearing
And organic silence cradles the crumpled-up papers
Disproven hypotheses and stories from another life

Your mother left the soup on low
As long as it took you to return,
Thistles hanging from your jeans and forearms.
You are not yourself, and never have been.

You want to pull off the same trick now,
Keep the burner going long enough so that
The quiet moments carry, the soup stays
Warm enough for both of you enjoy.

The loose-leaf lectures remain unnecessary.
You wrote a eulogy that day, but never recited it.
The tree continued to grow.

we
stepped into the gallery;
stepped onto pristine marble floors, sheen-decked, with our
grubby school shoes like
mud on palace gates;
stepped into a world of
suits and champagne and jewelry,
of cheese we couldn't pronounce,
of empty speeches and pretence;
"******* ***", as you put it.

we
walked around the exhibition, you weren't
all that impressed and you
didn't really keep quiet about it.

you were the only one, I think.

rich powerful men scare me.

we
walked down the hall, past
twenty closed doors, extending as if
mirrored to infinity;

you
were still unimpressed,
"This doesn't really work,"
you said.
"I feel like he's done
Everything he can with this style."

I think the same but I don't say the same.
rich powerful men scare me.

I wonder if
they're ******* their daughters behind those closed doors.

writing poems is pretentious they say,
did you know?

apparently I'm stuck up my own ***
if I don't

sorry you act to good to express how
you really feel

you think its 'gay' and 'pathetic'?
well okay

say what you want
I dont care

it makes me feel alive
do you like feeling dead?

it's like your thoughts come to life

and it feels so real

I feel sorry for you,
if you think you're too good to express

or maybe on the other end
you're just too insecure to address?

I sit here staring at my laptop
wondering why I can't write like I used to
and then I realise that my brain got so loud
that I'm lost for words

Lately find is so hard to find words
to describe anything
because I feel like
a lonely misunderstood cloud
of rain

I feel bad for the people that know me
I know its pathetic but its true
I can't seem to find myself for ages
I don't know if anything I say is true

I want to keep writing
I want to find myself
so maybe this will help me

He told me to revisit my past
so ill try.

So little, so innocent,
playing in the snow,
at the age of 5,
its all I had to know

I liked this boy,
he had blonde hair
he was incredibly cute
and my heart warms
when I still remember his name

we flew out one summer
to an island far far away
to see my dad, because we missed him so so bad
cash flow was low, what did I know
so we had to stay
on the island far far away

thrown in the deep end
of a language I don't comprehend
in a pool full of people
that didn't understand who I am

they laughed and they mocked
because what do they know,
this little foreign girl
so pathetic, I know

I cried and I sat
in silence for long
its how I became the 'shy one'
I know

here I still sit,
writing in the now not so foreign tongue
in an island far far away
what could I have known

Pretending to relish in
such a blasphemous living,

is an unpalatable,
nonsensical nerve wrecking blink.


Pretending to be alive
when you are not holding the knife,

is accepting a story
without important, logical strife.

Here I am, the manic pixie dream girl of, you guessed it; your dreams. I am here to ask you questions about your boring, probably something generic, major like business or management or maybe even some type of art form that no one really knew existed until you decided to bring it to your high school and of course the liberal arts school of your dreams has that EXACT program and all the means to support it financially. Of course, I will always ask about you. How your day is, how your plain black coffee is, what you thought of that one song that played as we were walking into the train after a date that both of us probably went on looking to get laid. But in the end, it will always be you. I will continue to fluff your deflated ego that was caused as such by some hollywood trope from your hometown like a cheerleader or maybe even someone who was on AV Club with you, who really knows, because I sure as hell don’t care to do any research into it. Now, part of being your early to mid-twenties manic pixie dream girl, it is essential for us to bond over old broken up bands that neither one of us were actually alive to see perform yet that dream of ours is still so prevalent as we make conversations over whiskey you assume I like because of it’s pretentious name that you will describe as “harsh yet creamy, dry but sweet” and on bad nights I will tell you that it tastes like the back of my father’s hand and you will laugh at a joke I did not intend to tell but then again I will have to ask you what is so funny. I will always be the one asking you about a life I am so willing to leave without even meeting your family. Being a manic pixie dream girl is all fun and games until I am the one always doing the starting of conversations, until I am the one sending you Spotify playlists that I know you will never listen to, until I am the one showing up unannounced. My name will roll off your tongue like smoke from your American Spirits, but only in the beginning, because by the end; you will cough when I finally tell you to stop calling me.

you don't deserve a word
not even a poem
how does it feel
when you lost the people
you confessed you "love"

how did it feel
when your own medicine
ran through your throat?
how does it feel
to steal so much time
from someone who treasured it?
holding it close to her chest
against her rib cage

how does it feel
to steal something you don't own
from a family you "care" for

and how does it feel?
to see someone who loves me
better than you do
because you thought
no one could ever love me like you