You’re haunting me
Rattling my bones with such a sweet song
The melody is setting my spine in a way
that causes my teeth to ache  
It’s the first taste of devastating paired with final notes of irreparable

I have your memory
Buried underneath my bed
slipped between folded up t-***** and double knotted
into the laces of my doc martins
hidden yet taken with me everywhere I go
It’s gonna end up driving me mad if I let it  

You’re haunting me
Yet here I am trying to exorcize my past
sinking my memories of you
right back into your dusted bones
I have you rolling over in your grave
Assured in your afterlife
this secret and I would go quietly into the night
Only I came back screaming

(my knuckles are skinned to the bone)
(but I will keep fighting. I will keep fighting)

I hear you singing in victory
Can you hear me
Answering back

- A secret for the night

I will learn vengeance
with the same grace
I learned how to be
soft and quiet

It will start in the middle of the night
When dead things rise
( like all dead things eventually do)
When the memories I left to the
( deep, dark, and 6 feet under)
Rise up awakening me within them
Ushering me
right into the real world
Where opinions brand like handprints and I bite the head
off my anger
every time someone tells me
(your better off)
Better for learning
how to taste fire and enjoy it
Better for watching
all my dreams fall out of my mouth like ash
Better for knowing pain
more intimately than someones love

I will learn vengeance
with the same grace
I learned how to be
Tamed and quiet

-- not gently and never in a way that left me the same as before

I let different boys touch me
Because I wanted to know
Even for a second
What it felt like to be loved
Even if the love was cheap
And it tasted like ***
Like the punchline to a joke
I never got because it was me

I let different boys have different parts of me
Parts they didn't deserve
But I offered up willingly because I couldn't give anything else
after you broke me
I was looking for different fingers
to place different pieces and hoping  the outcome
would be a masterpiece
Maybe one of them would find a way
to cover up the handprints you left all over me

I let different boys touch me because I had to prove to myself
you wouldn't be the only one
that these scars marking my body wouldn't define
my worth to be loved
I am not entirely sure  
you aren't the only one who could ever touch me without slightly  flinching

I let different boys touch me because that is all I have been taught
To be a joke
To be silent
To be ready to give until you have nothing left
- they keep leaving me and I am to scared to offer up anything more than my body to get them to stay

Remember
when you weren’t given enough sunshine
so you
s t r e t c h e d
as far as you could to reach it
Remember
when you woke up
to flames
licking at your lungs &
half remembered people  
screaming your name
Remember
the apology
you kept behind your teeth
for the person in the mirror
(I am sorry I can’t be enough)
I am sorry this apology
feels so brittle you hope
it doesn’t shatter and make you choke
Remember
when you got up
the next day and the next night
and every single time after that



- Do you remember when you kept going

The first place you call yourself-
a monster
where you admit 
that you- are a liar
Home is
where you learn becoming human 
Tethered inside stitched up skin 
you have enough emotions to- 
spill out 
But home is-
wanting for many things and getting none of them 
Half-feral and doing everything to not bite the hands that feed
You fold and fold and fold
until you are smaller- 
until you are not even really there at all 


- Home is where you go to disappear

I quit therapy, despite it helping me.
The place and time stopped being right.
I think she'd be so disappointed
I'm full of shame again tonight.