screaming to nothingness is painful.
my throat is raw,
begging to be felt
tears masking my strength;
blinding my vision.
I cannot be heard but I yell louder.
I’m trying so hard for you.
The nothingness is your deaf ears,
my words falling onto them,
Ignoring my pleas.
Hear me.
Why won’t you listen?

The cotton fluff from your sweater,
is stuck between my bitten down nails.
A symbol left behind from a night,
where my integrity was questioned.

Most of the marks you left are permanently scarred in my brain,
I bet your skin is tingling thinking of my touch;
scratching away at your flesh hastily.
The only reason you had to pull away,
was not because of my mantra that sounded so pleasant in your ears,
It was the pain that you couldn’t take;
though I was suffering a lot more.

You called me names because I was fighting for my safety,
the cruel reminders you hissed flooded my ears,
no one would believe me;
I’ll stay silent.

If I should have a daughter, instead of Mom, she's gonna call me Point B,
because that way she knows that no matter what happens,
at least she can always find her way to me.
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands,
so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say,
"Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face,
wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach.
But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air.
There is hurt here that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.
So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming,
I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself.
Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers,
your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried.
"And, baby," I'll tell her, "don't keep your nose up in the air like that.
I know that trick; I've done it a million times.
You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house,
so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him.
Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place,
to see if you can change him."
But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby,
because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix.
Okay, there's a few heartbreaks that chocolate can't fix.
But that's what the rain boots are for.
Because rain will wash away everything, if you let it.
I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me.
That there'll be days like this.
♫ There'll be days like this, my momma said. ♫
When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises;
when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape;
when your boots will fill with rain,
and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment.
And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.
Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away.
You will put the wind in winsome, lose some.
You will put the star in starting over, and over.
And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty **** naive.
But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar.
It can crumble so easily,
but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
"Baby," I'll tell her, "remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more."
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things.
And always apologize when you've done something wrong.
But don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing.
And when they finally hand you heartache,
when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat,
you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.

-Sarah Kay

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
You can let them look at you.
But do not mistake eyes for hands or windows or mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like.
They may have not ever seen one before.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
You can let them touch you.
Sometimes, it is not you they are reaching for.
Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwich, a Pulitzer — another woman.
But their hands found you first.
Do not mistake yourself for a guardian or a muse or a promise or a victim or a snack.
You are a woman — skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat.
You are not made out of metaphors, not apologies, not excuses.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
You can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.
Even after all this evolving it still feels unnatural.
Still strains the muscles, hold firms the arms and spine.
Only some men will want to learn what it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,
Admit they do not have the answers they thought they would by now.
Some men will want to hold you like the answer.
You are not the answer.
You are not the problem.
You are not the poem or the punch-line or the riddle or the joke.


Woman, if you grow up the type men want to love,
You can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love, it is discovering the ocean after years of puddle jumping.
It is realizing you have hands.
It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.

Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of women men will hurt.
If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along.
It is hard to stop loving the ocean even after it has left you gasping — "salty."
So forgive yourself for the decisions you've made.
The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night and know this:
Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble.
You have always been the place.
You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You are born to build.

-Sarah Kay

She is my therapeutic recipe of beautifully placed atoms.

A wonderful arrangement of parts, wound together with love and kindness, hidden behind a fake smile and shy eyes.
her mind a mess with cigarette smoke and memories, brought back to haunt her through lonely nights.

But it is here, in the mind, where she creates the most extraordinary things. Poems and word arrangements in ways I never could, expressing such deep emotions, that bleed from the page. Every word elegantly feeding into the next, delicately woven to appeal to the reader, I could get lost in those lines for hours.

Snake Bite

And let me down easy but do break my heart
Otherwise I'll never know if I should chase after y'all. And the longing comes nightly, the bourbon rings twice, every time I'm out living, y'all stop me from dying. But a man is worth pennies when his work is the dirt, and I've never known forgiveness I've only ever known hurt.

With my skin on the desert, my hands cut from the piste. If a man's responsible for fire, does woman make the stream. Everything is an eyesore when plague cuts at your flock, and the shepherd is aching to be rid of his cloth, the end of evil corrupts it, the sheriff he breaks his own laws. They take all that they want, leave you to look up to the crop, you can't sustain the pains of heartache, your words shorter while you talk. So please take it away, the flat and the plains. And only fires concern them, water drowns for them and cries. I don't need no one to listen, no one to soften my eyes. I've been bit by the river, it's taken my breaths. Filled my chest full of water, brought my time to new depths. I saw the valley, and I saw the moors. I saw the valley, just tell me, will she be here tomorrow? I've seen the valley, and I've seen the moors, just please won't you tell me, will she be here tomorrow?

Dubious: charge
The deluxe program in. Obtuse angled and oblong animals. Mecca sexúal, discoverer pulling back the curtain tails in mimicry and peacockiness as the horizon shimmers itself out. Do not eschew unwieldy ostentation towards benign mid-weight colors in the sequel to Blahnik.

Offers in the hesitant, peak winds of Southern-Hemispherical Antarctic weather barometer losses. The ice is like a hive of nameless blue lily pad vessels, each a different magical shade of the water's blue.

She like the uncommon baroque grandeur in an hour of time, herself-

Summons the immense symmetry of her elaborate lavender macramès sheath and entomb her skin, exploding across her body like milk-white daffodils draped upon a morning  bow. Linseed and anise encompasses burnt sweet grass on the breadth of pine in a gentle pillow, anchored only by the veins of her red fruit nectar stitched at the grooves in her cool and unpunctuated lips. While anxiety numbing tufts of gentle satins wisp all the worry and turmoil away, pleasing every nerve, sensor, instinct, and exercise of glib humanity intertwined amid the pulse of our uncensored adultness. She glides amid the arcs of ebullient-molecules ribboned in winter synonyms, summoned up in her sensual and illustrious sublime, and the story of how like a horizon muted by organzas falling beneath her into that relationship she carries with her water God into something profound, immense, and totally ******* exquisite, yet beyond all imagining, she is always doing what has been the coolest **** ever to me. That becomes more magnificently indescribable like our amorous fire, incentivizing the luminous beauty of new stars to rush above us, and yet under us too, amidst the simple and perfected automany she so awesomely imbues.

Until the minutes are silenced in our heads and the days are warm with you.

For Sarah

Almost wrote that I'd died,
But I'm no kinda man to lie, just feel like nothing.

Questions batten down our doors, the weather some women bring, suffering and solitude, nothing changes anything, can't tell anymore- from nothing.

She takes and gives me pain inside, drives us all to go. We're just meant to be alone.

Hurt on all my days, can't sleep, just sit, stare, and stay. I've been born but won nothing. There isn't anyone that can make me feel like something. She made me into no one. I feel worse than nothing. Sick, tired, and frozen. My reach keeps me out, away from evils that I keep to chasing.

Sometimes I can't keep from calling,
Won't you come back to my knee,
Some Tuesday in 2003, when we were something on the edge of nothing.

The skies keep my shadows black
Everything Wyoming has, and I love you
Something more than I've ever had. Don't leave me here, I don't want to be anywhere.

Hey Sarah when you go
Please leave on my evening shows
You can take everything you own
I never expected nothing, now I've got nothing.
Not even me, not even you, I'm no one
Speaking to myself and only talking back half the time. Sitting on my own, wishes worth less now, feet sagging into the dirt. I was never promised hurt, but it's something I've grown to need.

Now I'm stuck inside the mountains with the snow sewn to my legs. At least you let me believe you once when you said I'd be free and out from here. Just now there's nothing, my feet are graves to ears of yours that heard the only songs I've never wrote.

Instead of burying us away, I'll just take a stick and handkerchief and take me to a country where men like me can stay. And now I know the stories the both of us have had, and in the days leading up to we, you started with a punchline which ended as a lie. I'm just 6 ft, 160 pounds of nothing you're waiting on me to die.
But Sarah I have not forgot we promised to stay alive, so long as nothing never came back at us, and we could have something for ourselves to call a life.

She is a spindle on my bed
Reminding me of my mumma
  Sweating on my sheets,
naked, lewd, romanticizing me
  Not knowing I hide her
from my friends and family
  Not knowing I drink, pop
uppers, downers, as I prop
  Up against the headboard
and as I watch her cradle
  Her head between my
Half Caucasian, Half ******
  Thighs, riddled with scars
Seven years old, one year older
  Than the baby I gave up.

I wonder how I taste, how
  I look, Do I taste like shame,
Do I taste like love forgotten
  Do I look like the ******
The city girls gossip that I am
  Can you see the removal,
The crib I threw my child from
  The trauma that caused me to
Abandon him, to abandon me,
  What will cause me
To abandon you

  Sarah, my love, where have I gone
Why have I left you, bloodless,
  Soulless in the pitch black dreary
Gravelled upon the smoothness
  Of my deceitful, coarse projection

Sarah, I am sorry that my shame
  Coerced me to run from your
Eternal rays downward on my
  Dimpled, crooked smile, on my
Dimpled brown ***, attached to
  My snakey spine, what holds
My ribs, what protects my lungs
  Which do nothing but breathe
You.

You're so funny
Sunny little honey
Singing to the trees

You are charming
Your smile, disarming
And you charm them all with ease

Don't lose that thing
That invisible string
Which draws all others to you

Good's my intention
I should mention
So happy to have knew you

Don't you fear,
Sarah dear,
For it's never a bother

Peak-a-boo,
You know it's true:
I'm glad to be your father