On the evening of my sixteenth birthday
I remember curling my hair with an iron and
burning the tips of my fingers pink,
mumbling pained words under my breath
that I probably shouldn’t ever repeat
unless I desire to live beneath the shadows
of adult eyebrows being raised so high
they might never come back down

as if they had never said something like that
before

that night I put on a silver dress,
and lipstick so red it almost gave the illusion
that I had been bleeding from the mouth
but I felt unstoppable, so why not?

“why not” was the question
that was always replaced with stone-cold silence
and the shrug of a shoulder
instead of an answer

that night, I blew out sixteen flaming candles
and felt beautiful,
surrounded by the smiles of friends I had met in high school
and ones I had known since the days when our only worries
revolved around who had the prettier Barbie doll
and who held hands during recess in the fourth grade
and these thoughts caused my stomach to somersault because,
now that we were illuminated by candlelight and the brightness of celebration,
everything had changed.


I blew out my candles and did not wish
for a car, or a new wardrobe, or for more
faces to call my friends, but rather,

I wished to be taken seriously.

I knew there was a deep-rooted problem
when I became acquainted with real love for the first time
And everyone said that I was too young, too incompetent to understand
What that word even meant,
That I was silly for believing that such a concept could exist
When you’re sixteen and five and a half feet tall
and not that great at chemistry or parallel parking
and can barely even hold up a strapless dress
as if somehow that dictated
that I was too small, too stupid to realize that
love was something much bigger than I am
but I did.
I do.

And there is something so contagiously twisted
That lurks in our society like a epidemic
The idea when your age lies between thirteen and eighteen
you are not really a person
that instead, you are a shadow of ignorance that sleeps all day
and clothes yourself in different shades of apathy
and that the only things you care about are
alcohol-induced parties on Friday nights and
losing morals and hours of sleep while gaining temporary highs
as if that is the highest I will ever go in life

you have to be kidding me.

because you might look at someone like me
and snarkily remark that I never look up from the screen of my phone
and you might think that my taste in music is repulsive or that
I’m only holding his hand because I love the thrill of letting it go,
and you might think that people my age have brains
that contain only a spoonful of intellect and the rest is just
empty space filled up with disease
but maybe it is time that your pedestal falls
and you realize that the older the wiser
is hardly ever true at all

I have witnessed lives spiraling out of control

the truth is not that we are dirt
and no, I am not taking pictures of myself unclothed
or chatting with strangers in online rooms
maybe the reason why I’m on my phone
is because I’m talking my best friend out of killing herself
and I’m researching time travel and why the happiest people hurt the most
and a cure for my own depression
and better words to fit my poetry
I am not equal to the garbage you see kicked to the curb of the street
Or scenery while you ride on by in your horse and carriage

I am just as great
As someone who has spent 80 years of their life achieving
And if time is uncontrollable
Then why am I being treated like somehow,
I have not chosen to be here long enough to know anything at all

And one day I dream of having my words praised for the truth that they are
Rather than having eyes roll back in guilty judgment
Because I have not lived as long as you have
And yet I am the one writing the words

Because yes, I am sixteen.
I haven’t even been here for two decades
but I do not search for happiness in empty glass bottles and clouds of smoke like you think I do
and I do not play with hearts like they’re made of matches
because I know that they burn
and when I tell him that I love him
I am not doing it to **** time
and I know that life is sacred and
impossible to retrieve once it’s gone and I am not going to waste
the precious seconds of my own aching until someone decides
that maybe, I am worth listening to.

Because I know that I am.
And on my sixteenth birthday,
as I smiled scarlet in every photograph
I was right--
I am unstoppable.

the creativity is running out.
people are becoming robots;
their brains controlled
by the mechanics of greed.
but i refuse to succumb
to the ever growing sanity
of society
and humanity.
i will cling
to the words
and the music
and the art.
i will not be taken over,
my mind will not be stolen
by the goblins of the swollen
world below.
i will paint myself the colour of youth
and pray my camouflage
allows me to retain my imagination,
i will not lose it to the education
system which takes so many
minds of innocent children.
they used to dream
and feel
and smile
and cry.
now they sit in office blocks,
brains ticking like ******* clocks.
making phone calls,
the reciprocating voices also without souls.
and the art they used to create,
the beauty they used to dictate
hangs on the wall
of the long forgotten
art gallery of nostalgia.
creativity dismissed as playful,
boring must equate to important.
what happened to the people
who used to laugh at everything?
i refuse
to lose
the battle of my beauty.

I do not wish to be
an emerald, pressed firmly against
the flesh of someone else's finger,
to be marveled upon by eyes
that only see beauty disguised beneath layers
of self-inflicted ignorance.
I do not wish for a life
sitting gracefully upon its pedestal,
or a striking face behind a glass display
that has never tasted the sweat
of reality.
I refuse to pass days behind
white picket fences trapping me
from seeking out scarlet horizons
or to live by the shout
of a clock that is running out of words
to tell me that I mean
nothing.
I am not going to sit, confined within
the peeling floral paper
that embraces the same walls that suffocate me
nor will I let my heart sleep
within the cavern walls of a chest
that is starving to set it free.

I want to crawl towards comfort
with scraped knees that do not bleed apologies
and earth trapped underneath my fingernails
like a joke no one ever broke silence to laugh at
I want to harvest gratification
with these same hands that have taught themselves
how to let go of the ones
who have tried to set it on a silver plate
for me to eat.

I desire to be dizzy
on the last day I will ever grace the air
with my breath,
blinded by joy I had spent a lifetime pursuing
with shadows cast beneath these hungry eyes
that have realized--

that it takes a revolution
to be able to say that I did more
than just exist,
I conquered.

It started when I asked her what she desired
She told me she wanted to understand why the world has not loved her back yet
So I wrote her a map of everything she is:

Her eyes sing like sparrows on a Sunday morning
Tongue so soft her words asked to be returned once spoken
There is a serenade in her hands each time she touches a pen and
A lullaby in her fingertips

Plush red lipsticks do not know who she is
Beauty has not met anyone like her
Long stalks of wild grass are playgrounds for her summertime sandals and
Singing songs that hadn’t been loved in 30 something years
Summer dresses with last year’s flip flops forming an eloquence around her

She speaks with a purpose and it is to make you listen
Only bards and poets know what to call her
Words do not speak to who she is

200 year old Willow trees bow to her like a queen who has ruled with grace
She strolls slowly and steadily to places which indefinitely await her
She is a statue already built and a book already written
Complete

Eyes follow her figure like a fire burns through a forest-
Steadfast, sudden and swift
unable to comprehend the complete creation of all that she is

Many hearts pulsate with a plethora of pronunciations and proclamations of love,
Her name runs through your veins like secrets that get buried in cemetaries
You will die before you can forget her

No one ever taught me not to stick my hand in a fire, I just learned by common sense;
but here I am again, grasping for you and watching my hand blacken and burn.
Because every time you say that you don’t know what to say,
I want to call you a liar because you just spoke.  
But being speechless speaks louder than words and
the absence of sounds swallows me whole  
until your fire was all I saw and like a fool, I reached for it again.  
But as I did, in the darkness I couldn’t see that my paper heart
was starting to burn.

We all grew up too fast, pushing through pull ups and graduation robes as if they could be worn twice.
We learned that excuses and “I’m sorry”s could be said again,
but that didn’t undo the damage already done.
Now the angry redness of your ears matches the redness of my future and I can’t help but wonder how I could’ve messed this up so badly.
But then I remember that I have a PhD in impulsiveness, poor decision making, and panic attacks.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions,
so down I lay cobblestone after cobblestone until I reach the gates but I never enter.

Who needs hell when I have your fiery red hair and temperament
that develops into a burning rage that scorches my skin with silence, when I’d rather be slapped with sinful words that PG movies don’t allow. All I can say is that I tried, because that’s what we all do in this world; we try.  
Try our best, but fail anyways because success is for those who get lucky and this world is nothing but a game of chance with lottery tickets costing you more money than you will ever win, but we believe that there must be some essence of luck in our lives because we keep buying tickets.
She thought she was lucky.  She thought that in an oceanic timeline, surrounded by blue, that she had found a brown boat, brimmed with buoyancy and broken dreams that you shared.
She climbed into that boat, and side by side you sailed neither of you realizing that you were sinking.

That is the thing about the boats in which we sail, even when we assure ourselves that they will never fail.
In this world, we all have our own ships, but the trick is that these boats can only hold one passenger.
She had her own boat once.  She lost it, in maritime madness, one reason or another.  
When her boat was swallowed by the sea she started swimming, trying to keep moving. Sink or swim they say.
So as she swam, she spent all her energy and instead tried to tread and keeping her head above water was no longer a game that you played in summers spent at the shallow end of the pool.
It became a constant question of survival.
She must’ve been lucky, for your ship sailed by and
picked up the poor girl who then became a passenger of someone else’s vessel.
This boat was worn, and her captain had tried to patch the holes but as the two sailed, the ship began taking on water as they went.

When training to be a lifeguard, they teach you quite a few things.
Mouth to mouth resuscitation(which sadly is no longer actually mouth to mouth),  first aid, CPR, and how to pull a drowning victim from the water.
When people drown, our instincts kick in and we grab for  anything to keep ourselves above water and breathe.  
We don’t mean to hurt anyone else in the process but we just keep fighting for air.  
Sometimes the people push their rescuer under and even though we may try to hold them up, if we don’t breathe too we’ll drown!  
So what lifeguards are taught to do is if they are being pushed under
is to shove the victim off, swim away, and save ourselves.
Now some may say that sounds selfish and how can we do that when we’re supposed to be saving them, but we can only save them if we’re alive.  If we can breathe.

You told me dating me was like a breath of fresh air,
because when you were with her, you were held under for:
1, 2, 3, 4…10 seconds, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, 45, 83, 104, 255, 1013… 63,072,000 seconds - TWO YEARS.
So of course, I understood why you swam away.
Away from the girl who broke your boat because being drained of energy was something I used to do to others.  
I ****** the acid out of batteries and I walked on power lines, licked light bulbs, and suckled sockets because I too was once a drowning victim and but I hit the water was shocked by the electric energy that I had drained from him and it was hell.  
The hell that I had laid cobblestones too, the hell that one day I might see you in, because we’re all sinners here.  
We aren’t human if we don’t make mistakes, and ****’t I’ve made mine.

I fell from the ship and sank until I hit rock bottom, which was  somewhere right between a razor blade reef and pill popping plankton. It’s funny how solid rock bottom can feel beneath your feet, because we’ve been on our boats or in the water for so long;
but you can’t stay down there no matter how badly you want to
because your lungs are screaming for air so you push yourself up and struggle for the surface.
The Marianas Trench is the deepest point in the ocean, and I’m pretty sure that’s about where I landed.  
And I’m sure that if it wasn’t for a difference in timing, I would’ve seen her at the bottom too.
But that’s the split between me and her, because right now I’m back in my own boat and I’m breathing in fresh air but she’s gasping for a breath. She’s struggling to breathe but her lungs keep taking on water.

This doesn’t happen to just her and me, but there are hundreds of thousands of people out at sea.
Some decide to perform a self mutiny by mutilating their minds and jumping overboard and the truth is that not everyone makes it!
Some open their mouths underwater while screaming for help
but instead their shouts are choked out by the salty ocean that surrounds us all that we continuously mistake for our own tears.  
Some people are smarter. They wear life jackets, while the rest of us
use others as life rafts until we figure out how to rebuild our boats and I’m here to say that you can.
No, it’s not going to be easy. It’s never easy.  
Learning to swim wasn’t easy. When you first learned to swim you thought you would drown then, but you survived didn’t you?  
If Jack Sparrow sailed the sea, so can we.

So here I am, breathing in and I’m floating on,
trying to teach others that mending their ships is a pain but they have nothing to lose and so much more to gain.  
And there you are and if dating me is like breath of fresh air and you're fire, do I just continue to let you consume my oxygen until I choke on bitter words and stutter on sentences that I can’t spit out?
Sure my boat has holes in it and sometimes, the patches break;
but I have found that letting water in just isn’t for me so don’t plan on using wooden scraps of my boat to light your fire anytime soon because I know that even though this ocean seems vast and never-ending, we are all sailing somewhere.
Hopefully, we’ll get their soon.

Location location location*
Vocation vocation vocation
Des'pration
Des'pration
Des'pration
Cliché decay, is summation.
Dictation Fixation; Damnation.
Let's pray, son.
**** Nation- stagnation, frustration.


Creation.
Creation, salvation, elation.
Let's play son.

some days, when the pain is bigger than before, when it manifests itself into a coyote hunting down the prancing memories of the good days, chasing the sunset,
it's these days I ask myself if it was truly worth it?
is it better to have loved & lost; to have lived and died, than to be a spec of dust on the wind, washing the sky in colours undetectable.
we painted the clouds in rosy hues,
& loving you was like painting a canvas in every shade of red from every berry in every forest.
but when the paint dried & oxidized, & roses looked muddy like they had been stepped on out in the rain,
it was days like that I felt it was not worth it.
being shackled to the ground, sprouting from the soil and instant destruction,
this love was so young, so pure, so new and senseless,
yet agony awakened as your spirit drifted away from these leaves & thorns,
& I am just a small rosebud begging to blossom but you keep picking petals, playing a game of "I love her, I love her not"
how does this flower bloom if every day she fades back into the ground, trampled by the crash of timber from the shaky earthquake of your voice.
cowering in the corners from the thunder your voice emits, from the high heavens.
so holy you seem with your voice so high, so above and beyond the trees my petals could never reach.
& yet so terribly close you feel, how your voice carries on the wind, howling from dawn to dusk.
so I understand now why it hurts so much.
how you were once all of nature, but the forest burnt to the ground, ashes to ashes,
we, the remains of nature, scattered across the earth.
you're love was so short, a glimpse of light, a lunar eclipse,
& the forgetting is so long, a year of April showers, a mourning period where flowers don't grow, flash floods in my eyes & around every corner.
forgetting is all to difficult, but I'll take it.
I'll take the rain any day, to have felt your light if only for a fraction of a moment;
if only to have it vanish like the wind.

I want to find
pure happiness
on the mariana's trench
deep with all of the other
shipwrecks like myself
The ones who couldn't hold
it together even when the water
was calm

I want to find serenity
between the tetonic plates
where the two continents
were separated
like two souls on a
bone chilling winter night
like you and I were
when I saw the glimmer in
your eye fade away
a star died that day,
did you know?
I named all the prettiest
ones after you
3,888 stars
one dying every
day

You're never really
told about how to deal
with loss.
"You'll be okay."
what is okay?
I never really learned
what "okay" was. The
first time I heard okay escape from
someone's lips was when my mom
began accepting her failing marriage
and asked how she felt.
"Okay".
**** that word to hell.

If I asked you politely
Would you quietly *******?
The crap you keep saying
Is like a tubercular cough.
If lies were visible to us
You’d look like a gas cloud.
You don’t just think like a fool
You say it all out loud.

Take a ride on the Reading
Do not pass go.
Go directly to jail, ****.
For a decade or so.
You don’t have any credit
With me, that is for sure.
If you are a disease I bet
Science hasn’t found a cure.

It’s almost like nobody has
Ever taught you about things
Like transparent lying, and
Disgusting racist mutterings.
The only thing that stinks more
Than you is your philosophy.
It’s just psychotic ramblings
And not much else to me.

You’ve lost all your possessions
From decisions you have made.
Now your half interest in hell is
A thousand degrees in the shade.
When you talk, nobody listens
Because they know you will lie.
We hide when we see you coming
And come out after you pass by.

Take a ride on the Reading
Do not pass go.
Go directly to jail, ****.
For a decade or so.
You don’t have any credit
With me, that is for sure.
If you are a disease I bet
Science hasn’t found a cure.

I scream and shout over your shoulder
10 decibels too loud yet it's like it never reached your ears, not a single noise
not even the sound of the truth
can't help but wonder
Do you hear me?

take comfort in the fact no scars, no marks were left on my skin, only salty tears
I tell myself sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me
its all a lie protecting myself, telling myself it's okay
Do you feel me?

choke back tears did it really happen if you can't see it?
too many questions dancing in my head, this won't happen again sometimes we all get out of control right
kisses mean nothing, can't even apologize, am I that worthless?
Do you taste me?

making endless excuses I believe, just to remember that the only affirmation of my pain is locked up in the twisted vault of my memories
still wear your favourite red dress and rose perfume only time you're ever happy
Do you smell me?

other days it's like I'm not even there, out of sight, out of mind, just a distant thought within you but you have to remember that I see you!
I see all of you!
like a ghost or I'm invisible I start to float away
Do you see me?

wasted time, regret, a death sentence I condemned
too many questions maybe this is the end
*Did you ever love me?