Scraped knees and burnt lungs
Hair pulling and touching tongues
Study hard, fail a class
Makeup on, the perfect mask
Scales and ***, you have no power
One night stand, take a shower
Class at eight, get up at nine
Lie to your parents, "I'm doing fine"
Black lace bra, **** dress
Frat house party, look your best
Pills and smokes, just one more
Boy comes over, shut the door
Greedy hands and spoken words
Words he says he never heard
Sink running, your eyes are too
Look in the mirror, someone new
Black circles, white washed skin
"How the hell did I get so thin"
Another pill, another chapter
The college life everyone's after

We talk as if
Your hands have more wrinkles
And your eyes have seen
The world

As if
I don't deserve your
Time or effort because
You don't want to be seen with
An embarrassment like me, because
I haven't "lived"

But please don't forget
You once looked at me with
Eyes that didn't need
To see the world,
And once, your inexperienced
Hands were used for learning the curves
Of my body rather than illustrating
The journeys that have made you so
Cultured and wise

Darling, I'm so sorry, but
You've got it all wrong
As if you know what
It really means to
Live

I let him emotionally manipulate me for 2 years because I was afraid of being alone. I didn’t have courage to let him go because I didn't think I deserved any better because no one was offering me any better.


But the freedom I found when I let go of him was more beautiful and exhilarating than any twisted “love” he had ever given me or ever could give me.

Here it is
the poem on survival, the one you've all been waiting for
where I learned to untie the noose from my smile,
my smile from the trigger warning.
Here's your trigger warning:

I shivered when you kissed me.
I had a hard time believing my heartbeat was a good thing; had a hard time
believing the front door was still an option.
I wake up some days and remember when I used to sing bruises onto my skin,
fill up large towels with my blood,
watch it go black,
watch everything go black.
Still remained smiling;
still stood with the scars; with the ink between my teeth baring
a warning sign for whoever comes next,
for whoever wants my body without wanting my mind.
here it is
here is how i survived:

I hurt myself

I still do it just doesn't show
the scarring.
here it is baby boy come inside its about to get ugly,
you're about to see me cry,
you're about to see me shake,
you're about to find out what im really made of,
I'm about to find out if you break.

are you scared yet
this is a challenge you never step down from,
you brave boy!
you with your sword and white horse;
shining at the darkness inside of me; shining at the stench inside me ; come here,
make me feel whole.

Some distances seem insurmountable
Miles can be light years in the wrong hands and
A solitary life was never what I wanted but
You're gone and all I have left here is
Love for you
Contempt for myself
Long nights filled with nothingness
And a desperate need to be okay

one--

this paper is cold underneath my fingertips
grating
and i'm shifting thoughts like puzzle pieces.

so many writers have commented on sunlight slanting
curling around motes of dust.
thousands of similar phrases:
sadness,
the flat gray of mid-january mornings,
love, hips, the night sky,
clocks.

two--
                                    
who knows how to articulate
the feeling of being a high school senior
feet anchored in waterproof boots
surrounded by a clogging,
dragging
stagnancy

three--

breathe and you fog up the glass
four flat tires--
a lit up exclamation point on the dash.
let's pull off the road
route 9, 10, 11,
numbers, letters
signs bent by the plow,
and the pavement's salted
and the trees chilled quiet
wow, look here--
a seedy gas station
and an out of order pump.

just paint me a picture of a graham ******* trail.


"you know
sometimes when i'm walking back from lunch
and its windy
i like closing my eyes
and stretching my arms out
and pretending i'm somewhere else
preferably a place with less buildings
and more trees"*

                                                        ­                       *"well said.
                                                           ­                     if that isn't a story
                                                           ­                     then i don't know what is."

11:45
Sitting on the beach staring up at my
"High School" friends,
Isn't that weird, having to put the word
High School before so you know I'm not talking about
All the other people I've met since college

It may not seem like it matters but it does
Because these are the people I grew up with and now
Everything feels so different

11:50
They're lighting another joint, I watch their eyes
Go from open and alert to smiling and red
I don't join them and they look at me like I've changed
Into an entirely different person
But it's not just that which makes me feel
So out of place

11:55
A white lie of feeling sick puts me back in my car
To send me back to the "comfort" of my home
But the only sickness I'm feeling is the
Depression deep in my stomach

11:59
I pull up to a red light and stare
Absent minded at the car in front of me

12:00
Happy Birthday to me. Green light.
I turn left and seriously contemplate
Driving my car head first into the stone wall ahead of me

12:03
Another red light
I tell myself I can't think like that
But am so surprised that college didn't make me
More normal. I expected it to change me
In so many more ways than it has

12:10
Pull into the drive way and
Carry myself up the same stairs I've been
Climbing since I was born
I don't think anyone should live in the same house
For nineteen years
There are memories hiding in the walls and
Secrets behind every closed door that can't escape me

Present Time
I'm in bed writing this meaningless poem
Thinking about him, and it's giving me this
Weird feeling in my fingertips

My computer has had this virus for the past two months
That I keep ignoring, too lazy to fix, too busy to find out
What exactly is wrong
I think my computer and I have a lot in common

So Happy Birthday to me
Nineteen seems like such a hollow age to be

I am awoken by a nagging in my head
its in my mothers voice
the urgency,
I don't know what for, its 5 am.
my submission doesn't speak.
I fill the air with the sound
of my nonsense, a rambling of dreams,
"dont burst the bubble, burst the bubble, burst the-"
a never ending melody.
Because there is nothing louder than this, I have wanted to crawl out of my skin long before I knew it was mine.
And theirs, not mine entirely, composed of DNA so imperfect
even the gods would've laughed.
If you ever want to **** something up to the point its unrecognizable,
give it to me, look what I did to my own potential.
Squander doesn't begin to cover it, almost out of spite.
and i must stop it before it reaches my eyes
it has a certain way of clouding them over
and I just dont want people to realize
that I am swallowing a lump
at the back of my throat
what seems like forever
trying not to get my eyes to burn or
dig my nails deep into someones throat
just to feel their artery and scream
"YOU ******* FEEL IT DONT YOU?
ARE YOU ALIVE? ARE YOU REALLY HERE?
YOU ARE ALIVE, ALIVE ALIVE!."
Then place the sharp bits of my nails
against my skin, hard
and not feel
anything
I struggle with self control
especially with ***
and drugs
and alcohol.

I yell too often, never loud enough to make them hear me.
I am afraid of my own voice
telling people to shut up
Jack knows its not a good thing if I whisper
last time I did I said
"I don't have a pulse, I cant find my pulse."
Before I freaked out and smashed that vase against the wall
and laughed at what a sad broken cliche I have become.
My anger came out in sputtering sobs

And he tried to hold me
because that's what people do in movies
cue the background music
but I didn't let him because I was never any good at acting,

and he never got mad when I hit him
I can hear that "Sshhhh" at the back of
my ear
Forever.
and I could wince at my own humiliation if I gave a ****.
I wont lie it was awkward he sounded scared
"aww dont c-c-ry"
thought I saw a tear there too

the water is murky and ***** and grey
but the fish keep swimming and swimming and
nobody asked to feel this way
but if the fish manage to survive
we can too

The moon is full
This jacket is warm
My flask is empty
You are not here