Notches in her spine,
     bruised hard and in between.
Her sharp red hair,
     torn from the root and in clumps around your feet.
Blood pooling in your mouth,
     the drops look different on your sheets than they do on her skin.
Fluttering doves on the windowsill,
     afternoon sunlight and pressed flowers in books you know belonged to him.
Charcoal smudges darker than shadow,
     along the crease in your thigh and her shattered scapula.
Papercuts line the soles of her feet,
     and his teeth swallow you whole.

There's a danger in sleeping with a friend.
You find out he's just a stranger in the end.
Pretty words, they trip me up,
then I fall and get my heart ripped up.
You shut the door, left me cold.
Thought you'd say more, if I wait I'd grow old.
Funny how you insist you're too busy for me,
when my kiss had your eyes dizzy for me.
I should have known.
Your eyes were closed,
the way you moaned,
they weren't just for me alone.
I'm not a solution to your heartbreak,
I wish you weren't another memory for my heartache.
You used to ******* adore me.
I didn't realize that's what ******* a ***** means.
I used to swap spit for love,
lips for love,
***** for love,
but all I got was ***** who think
I'm not good enough.

Whisper fierce and hungry, say you'll forever stay my angry muse.
Bite my lip and and scream my name, make your voice my claim to fame.
He offered you such cruel disdain, so come to me. I'll ease the pain.
Shower me with your abuse. A broken heart's a good excuse.

He caged your beast, now set it loose.
Forget the past, what's left to miss?
Take me with you; Let us fuse; rest his name in your tattoos.
Shower me with your abuse. Say you'll stay my angry muse.
Rebound with me in one night's bliss;
His heart is something you can't have,
but my body's here for you to use.

I’m the one I think you’re supposed to hate
Because I’m the she when you find a spot to lay all your jealousy
I’m the his of the past,  that’s poisoning your beginning, and,
I guess you don’t know this, but I’m your best friend.
I’m the whirlwind that picked him up, turned him on his head,
The ******* that soaked your hopes in an acrid frailty.
I am the first red-lipped ice queen to bite at his neck
I am the first to coax “I love you” out from the pit in his chest
And he won’t fall for you as easy
No he won’t ever look at you the same
Because his boyish fantasy was a slender girl with a lopsided grin,
Who started games with his mind, that he never did win.
And you might dust off the memories, try to enroot more for yourself
But picking off the scab of me will only make him sore
I’m so sorry that I hurt the one you love, that I stuck around
I’m deemed unworthy of redemption,
I will still, always, and forever, love him more
You can't take me down.

I didn't know a broken heart,
until the day I realized I could never make you as happy
as she once did.
And in that very moment,
every second where I made you look away,
crushed every second where I held your gaze.
My childish attempts to make you love me,
need me,
at least want me,
seemed to only push you further.
I wonder
how much it took for her?
How many times you wound yourself around her wrist
was it even a better kiss?
There goes my growing confidence,
along with the bracelets you've left on the floor
gifts gone amiss.
I don't know if I am enough.
Fear is all I feel through this love.

His lips danced over my neck,
And I pretended they were yours,
His hands grabbed at my body,
And I pretended they were yours,
And when he kissed me,
He was a thirsty man roaming a desert,
With no water for days,
I was his water,
quenching his thirst,
But I didn't want water,
I wanted wine,
I wanted what I couldn't have,
And pretended to be satisfied with what I could take.

When I cried,
He held me, protected me,
And didn't ask why,
He didn't need to know,
He just knew I was his light but he wasn't mine.
He knew he couldn't illuminate me the way you do,
He knew he couldn't set me on fire,
Like your eyes do,
He knew I was forever bound by the darkness your presence left me.

His words didn't fill me,
Like yours did,
How easily he agreed with everything I said,
And how beautiful he found my mind to be,
He smiled when I told a bad joke,
And laughed when I said I could rap,
He didn't confuse me like you did,
He didn't hide from me,
Or go against my current,
He just knew I was an ocean he wanted to go along with,
And get lost in,
You thought I was stupid,
And had too much water,
You wanted something simpler,
Because you were a forest,
Complex and full of secrets.

He hates you,
He hate what you do to me,
He hates how you speak to me,
He hates how I feel stupid whenever you scold me,
He hates how I whisper your name when he makes love to me,
He hates how I let you hurt me over and over,
He hates how much he loves me,
He hates how much I don't love him,
He hates how my heart doesn't belong to him.

Whenever I look at you
I know what I'm doing
Isn't making it any better
But I still look at you
Almost every day
I try to feed myself
With your willingness
Your "beauty"
Which isn't really your beauty
But just a cheap
Shortened version thereof
A minute long relationship
If I think you're really hot
And it's a sad one
It's a rebound I live
Every day
I keep rebounding with you
But it doesn't seem like
I ever bounce away from her
Sometimes I wish
You were someone real
But then I'd be crying
Even harder
Because I'd be giving more
Of myself away to you
So maybe it's better that
I only see images of you
I cry enough already
And I need a rebound
But rebounds don't work for me
You don't work for me
But I still give myself to you

Black striped knee-highs in your old photographs
Black knee-highs on me
Your face blurs under the breaths you take
Lips, skin, absorb, kiss, breath
His rough hands ghost over my shoulder blades
Her eyes are scorch marks on your hips
As you're pulling me into your mouth I can't help
Teasing behind an earlobe, trailing along your jawbone on my way
Remembering memory foam, imprinted on my tailbone, precarious
Beneath the divet of his thighs
And she's on you, in you, around you,
He's with me, caressing, wanting
Their scents linger within the sheets
Your scent lingers on my tongue
And I dip my head to shut them up
Shut them up - "I'm so glad I don't hate you"

"I'm so glad you don't hate me"

                                                And I know they've won.

I always thought I knew what love was.
Then I met you.
You could reach places of my soul
that even I didn’t know existed,
each smile was another reason to live,
Every time you laughed
I fell more in love.
every time I looked into your coke-and-whiskey eyes
each pant after a kiss carried a thousand poems
about those eyes in it.
You gazed at me like an artist
would admire Van Gogh,
you held me like I was the answer
and for a while, I thought I was, with
Your fingers pressing into my hips
in a way that I later found out
was to intercept the thought of your hands
on her hips.
You played me
like I was the last cello on earth-
but not in a good way.
And I know it’s pathetic,
but you’re the heaven
and the earth to me,
because you were the only person
that could make me smile the way you did.
It was supposed to be just ***,
but I’m in love with you-
present tense.
I want to lay in bed with you
under sparkling blue Christmas lights
strewn out across my walls like everything
I never thought I could say
but found the opportunity to,
I want to kiss your scars,
I want to fix your broken hearts with
duct tape and a song,
and I want to admire every inch of your body
because it’s perfect,
even if you don’t think so.
I want to do things to you
that I’ll never have the opportunity to do again,
because while everything about you
wrecks everything about me
in what I thought was
the best possible way,
I turned out to be a rebound.
A substitute
for a girl who gave you a murky puddle
just big enough to catch the reflection
of you two hand in hand,
while you drowned me in the clearest ocean
I could have given you.