I wish I'd stop beginning. 
Everything I begin ends, and I can't stand the endings. So I should stop the beginnings.
But I can't stop beginning, because that would mean the end of beginnings. And I hate endings. 
If only I could begin something I knew wouldn't end. 
Sadly, it isn't up to me. It simply depends on the proximity of your orbit to mine. I am not magnetic enough to keep you still; your orbit will draw you near to me just long enough for us to begin, then you will continue on your path, leaving me in your wake with only an ending to hold.
And I hate endings.

The child inside me awakens first.
She's too excited to sleep any longer.
She sees the light crack through the blinds
and a glimmer of excitement begins to flicker inside her.
A new day already?

But the adult in me soon follows, swinging heavy feet over the edge of the bed,
rubbing bleary eyes.
The child drags her along, pointing to the morning sun,
telling her,
Look, look! Another day, another day!
She looks, humors the kid.
Seeing the sun again makes her nauseous.
The adult in me yawns, makes the coffee,
stares in the mirror for a bit too long. Considers getting back into bed.

The child in me wonders every night, what good will tomorrow bring?
The adult in me does not wonder. Stopped wondering long ago.
She knows exactly what tomorrow will bring.

The child wishes all the time that she could be awake.
The adult begs all the time for the world to let her sleep.
They are both crying this morning.
We are both crying this morning,
because today is exactly what half of me
expected it to be.

There used to be enough of me
to drown all this pollution.
Now the ratio of me to filth
is too weak for dilution.

A single drop in each brown eye
forms stagnant pools, dark shallow seas.
Slick greasiness between my toes
is rising slowly toward my knees.

Splinters, wrappers, copper wire,
styrofoam and paper cups,
sneakers, speakers, shards of glass
from muddy depths come bubbling up.

I’m brimming full of chemicals -
a stinging, burning pool of filth,
and near the surface do now float
the carcasses of things I killed.

I hope and I wish with all my heart
that I can make you as happy as you make me,
because I swear to god you’re everything I’ve ever wanted
and ten times what I’ll ever be.

I have, for whatever reason, been given a chance with you.
and I am so
*******
terrified,
because now that I have you
the only thing left to do
is to lose you.  
(The only thing that hurts more than unrequited love
is having loved and lost.)

But believe me when I say that I’m going to work.
I’m going to try
so ******* hard
to be half the person you deserve,
to be everything you want me to be.

I just hope you know
that you’re not obligated to stay
just because of everything that’s happened.
I hope you’re still here
because you want to be
and not because you feel like
you have to be.

I love you.

But if you need to go, well.
I already know what it feels like to die.
Could a broken heart be worse?

Maybe I’m not making myself perfectly clear.
Love, is it is my actions or my words
causing your unfounded fears?

Why would the wise and snowy owl
abandon the tree in which it lives
and rush into the howl
and the whipping of the wind?

Why would the traveler, lonely soul,
forsake the comfort of his bed
to seek the cold and distant queries
of the shrouded road ahead?

Would a musician ever still his hands
and hush his singing heart?
Why would he ever shun his only brand
of expression, his own art?

And a poet, just like you and I,
could never still her  pen
for the images in her mind’s eye
seek restitution, fitting ends.

I need you. I am yours.
I am in love with all you are.
Please let me show you, each day more
in love than the day that came before.

Put away your doubt for once.
Suspend your disbelief.
I promise never to leave you,
for what a fool, then, would I be?

We are all trapped in this same cycle.
It is a tacit misunderstanding
of what it means to be a part
of the same cycle.
Out is in
back is forward
me the details of the meeting I missed
the bus last week when it was raining and the trees
are finally changing colors again, it was a late fall
into this same cycle with us
is just a word is just a
space to fill a lack.
I am just a space to fill a lack.
I am a space full of
lack.
I lack the space it would take
to feel full of anything but
this same cycle.

Through the branches of the trees
comes blackness.
There is nothing on the other side.
Relax and it waters down.
Focus and it glints like a blade.

Drifting formless from room to room
I am the ghost in my house.
The leaves have somehow found their way inside,
they will soon let in the cold behind them.

Relax, focus.
Blackness holds its form.

I would now like to relate to you
the dilemma with which I am faced:
Not to be morbid or anything, but.
Despite my best efforts
I am still alive
and must go on living
the same life I thought I had abandoned for good.

So, what in the name of the holy ******* ghost
am I supposed to do  now?
Because, I hate to be a ******,
everyone,
I hate to **** the vibes
don't wanna harsh the mellow or anything, here,
wouldn't want to put you out or anything,
but nothing has changed.
I mean, it's a little unsettling to just
jump right back into the shark tank
with the stitches from the last attack
still fresh from the needle.


Anyway. That's all I needed to say.
I know this isn't a blog, but. I really like to put the words down.
Thank you for your time.

This time, I have my mind made up.
This time, I am content with my future.
I am done writing, I have written enough
to fill an ocean with pages of poems.
Today is not about writing.
Today, finally, is about action.

Remember what it was like
Not to try to **** yourself
With a cigarette
Every time that paper touched your
Lungs?
Remember what it was like
To just
Enjoy it?

This bed, though twin-sized,
is still too big and too cold
without you in it.

Lay it on thick, thicker
Go ahead and
spread yourself out.
Cut off your limbs and arrange them
to spell "HELP" across the sandy shore.
Burn all your flares at once
and scream with all the blood you have left,
"PLEASE, GOD, PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME HERE ALONE"

There is nothing inside
and yet
the body convulses,
gagging out useless sounds
empty air,
and it is poetry,
it is art
if you give it a title.

I don't know what I'm doing,
but it feels a lot like asphyxiation.
In the middle of the nighttime
amber-lit and silent street,
barefoot on wet asphalt,
the lightning strikes and for a moment I see
the trees illuminated and remember
how grand and endless the world used to seem,
how the sky was still, to me, mystery.

The rain picks up to remind me
that it sees me there, and does not care.
I am small against the sky, and
the careless lightning has offended me and '
the trees seem so cold,
so swollen and heavy with rainwater,  
that my hands cover my ears
and I run for cover but without sound I am
unbalanced as a cat without whiskers and I
fall into a puddle
and drown.

Can one be filled up with non-things?
Electrons in a shell, their negative charges
dense and balanced,
a double negative --
What is the opposite of a blank space
and why is it so thick with hurt?

                        Obsession.
      A binary.
Everything or nothing,
dead or so frighteningly alive.
        
                           Fear.
      A lingering.
You are the author of all your failures,
and you cannot escape their weight.
            
                           Disgust.
       A constant.
A grub worm gorges itself below the surface.
The maggot and vulture feed on rot.

                             Apology.
        A tradition.
If you were really sorry you wouldn't have done it, and
certainly wouldn't have done it twice.

how the **** do I
say it say it say it please,
SIR
It has been said.
Scream all you want.
I was never for a moment afraid
that words would fail me.
It never occurred to me  that one day
there would be nothing to say.
I have something to say.
It is a sound. It is a feelingthoughtbreathtoneimagemoment
it is lost in the timespace
internal,
I have murdered the grammatical fiction,
alas! I drowned her by accident,
I am Bigger Thomas
I am Mary Dalton
I am no one and nothing, I am dead.
I am alive, and that is troublesome again.

This won't be pretty, she said.
Love poetry, ha-HA, shut up.

I used to have so much to say,
I used to think people were listening,
but I haven't heard a word myself in years.
Have you?
Suddenly I find a vast cavern to scream into,
it returns not even the faintest echo,
and I don't have it in me to feel surprised anymore.

Weak and sick and useless,
bloated and stupid,
flies in the compost,
drunk with the brevity of life.
Tomorrow could be the day,
Tomorrow might just be the day,
I pray with all my might that tonight is my night.

This time I will fight with friction;
WinterFear is no affliction.
Ready or not, you frigid *******,
here I ******* come.

Were they such fragile hands as these, those that built all this?
How did they find their way to sleep on nights so cold as this?
Before the stars gave their permission
and the mountains hadn't noticed
what did man think when he woke to find
the world still stood?

From here it looks a lot like a trap, to me,
there aren't any answers to this riddle.
I don't want to be alive anymore,
I've known that since I was thirteen.
I think everyone has. This is no news to you, though.
But that is no excuse for this,
the filth I've let accumulate,
stood by smoking a cigarette watching the drains clog
with clumps of fine blonde hair and purple-green leaves
and embracing that same old smell of stagnation and rot.

"I was there," he told me, "when things changed up for good,"
and he chattered out clipped images, too cold to sleep,
"There were fires in the sky, it was brilliant like a dream,
I was standing in the street and what stood out most to me,
there was someone in the window of the house across the street
and they tore their eyes away from the coming of the dark
long enough to look me in the eyes
and draw their curtain."

It's been all of twenty years, and that's enough.
I asked to be excused at eighteen,
but someone with a louder voice than me
must have shaken his head at my request.
I remember waking up.
The world still stood, and I wept.

I have a funeral to go to.
I missed the last one.
They're all dying off, one by one.
Had to happen eventually, I guess.
Everyone has to die sometime, you know?
Everyone and everything.
No matter how much it hurts,
and no matter who killed them.
Everything ends.

I think the biblical flood washed the love out of the world. I think God decided we didn't deserve something so pure, so he washed it off the face of the earth and left us here to try and fill its void, to remember the world with all the cracks full of love and wonder why we can't seem to keep anything standing. The world is dusty now, covered in rubble from all the things that we built, hoping love would hold them strong. We hoped for love, we dreamed of it.

falling
            hurt

                              just

         like

                               I
                                         knew
                                                      it
                           would.

And I thought I was the heroine!
I thought I knew the way out!
Thought I was burrowing skyward!
Here I thought I was the scout!

I thought I swam to the surface!
I thought I'd conquered their fear!
I thought for sure, I was certain,
but I lost twenty one years.

I have given up on
getting up because
giving up hurts less,
yes?
New lines, old news
as ugly as anything else I saw coming
because I knew like I knew
but seeing it in the mirror is,
well,
that's new news.
I reject it as part of F2,
a mental plane I must have wandered to infinity
back before they scared me into pinning myself to cork,
abandoned on a broken pane of the looking glass
babbling and reeling among mirages of
empty fields and cotton gins.
I used to collect shards of broken bottles,
mined them up from the red dirt at the steps of
the old abandoned church. I called them
my diamonds, and I had a whole jar full,
and I was ******* somebody, then,
with my jar of diamonds
and my white hair
and even then I think I knew
like I knew
there is no new.
I have memories of a dead woman seated upright
in a rocking chair in that church,
bathed in bare sunlight from holes in the shingles,
the day my grandmother and I dared sneak past
peeling paint and rusted hinges,
the day we found the typewriter.
The dead woman was covered in dust,
navy-blue rags hanging from bones,
crisp white hair draped across
used-to-be shoulders.
I knew she had been there all along;
I know she is there still. She told them all,
'They will come,' like she knew that she knew,
and we knew that she knew, so we did.

You get tired.
Off you go,
Locked down, or whatever --
I'm not doing it anymore.
Old boy
Looking at everybody,
He hit the electric start.
Had a hell of a time, some of the time
Good enough.
I figured as much.
The trip itself
Around the outside edges,
Not that bad.
Every night
Beginning to rag on me.
I'm glad,
Helpful to most people.
He's home.

Sometimes I see the things that remind me of you
and I wonder if they're still the things you enjoy taking time to do.
But the you I knew is likely not the new you,
so I will preserve in my head the image of you
and hold fast to the things that made you the you I knew.