Vines creep
where memories once lived
Flowers bloom
where lips once locked
Sapling takes root
where a heart once beat
Soil smothers
where words once spilled
Grass tangles
where fingles once fumbled
Ivy chokes
where eyes once gazed

It seems to be the
End of the road

There’s a girl.
She lives somewhere between Dayton
and the rusty, old tracks of Georgia.
Lips like cinnamon, hips like sugar.
She smells like October but shines like summer.

But underneath,
she’s calloused and bruised.
Surviving off an *****
that only pumps blue,
matching the hues of her arms.
You can read them like a book,
                                          they tell her story.

Her tears could fill the empty
keg her cheating boyfriend drinks from,
as she cries her galactic eyes to sleep.

She awakes, breathes easy,
but stays.

As if to prove she has heart, by letting him break it.
As if to prove he loves her, by letting him break her.

Every song rings with them, their bittersweet echoes seep into the melodies
Every photo bring us back to a time we yearn for
Every day marks the beginning of another love, another loss, another memory
We are polluted with memories
We create memories every day
And each new one never really leaves
It simply manifests itself in a different facet of our lives
Be it a place,
A song,
A shirt,
A person,
The possibilities and triggers are endless
Living with them will bring everything from tears to joy
We may be poisoned by them
Or we may be lifted by them
But they are there, whether we like it or not
And just like the coffee stain on my desk
My memories will never leave me

this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about all the ways i've let my father down and
    all the things they wish i was.
  it will be about every grade point i am away from perfect.
it will be about ******* my boyfriend in the backseat
it will be about drinking until i can barely walk
it will be about crying all my makeup off in a stranger's bathroom.
this poem will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.
it will be about laughing over stupid ****
it will be about late-night confessions to my mother
it will be about my best friend and my favorite socks and my thousands of little things.
it will be about a boy who tastes like green tea and cigarettes.
it will be about all the things i don't ever say out loud and all the things i can't write down anymore because people find the things you write down and then you don't have anything for yourself.
  it will be about the time i made my stepmom cry
  it will be about the person i didn't think i'd be
  it will be about all the paintings i don't finish.
it will be the things i found out about my family at a too-young sort of age
it will be my three without-permission-piercings
it will be the poems (this one) that i'm afraid are too cliche
and it will be bitter,
the way i hate my tea to be.

if it were up to me?
   ****. it'd be cigarettes and tea
     and my giant cat by a giant window, and sparse furniture, and wooden floors.
it'd be a certain someone and poems scattered around every paint-splattered surface,
and writing on the walls in sharpie,
and tights and socks and sweaters and walks in the park.
          it'd be mid-morning sunlight and sleeping till noon and no walls separating the rooms.
         it'd be london or new york or maine or ******* canada or something -
something far away and obscure and artistic
where it rains a lot
so that i can dance.

Your clouded mind breeds frantic thoughts,
Your starved body poses queer answers

Your vision,
eclipsed by the darkest of clouds,
strains to witness the gleaming sun
they promise rests on the horizon

They’ve become immune to the horror of it all,
deeming your story trite,
ceasing to listen,

But ill be here with hand-cupped ears,
absorbing your every last utterance
of doubt and fear