I wish I had actual pictures of our greatest hits

Driving down country roads in the dark

Snuggled up against you on the bench seat of your truck

Walking around Boardwalk, holding hands and telling *** stories

Cuddled up in a hammock to watch the fireworks

Star gazing near the old paint ball place

Embracing each other whilst perched atop your tool box

Countless movies that we’ve seen together, my head rested against your shoulder or chest

Your arms around me

You make me feel safe

You make me feel secure

You are the only one who I believe

I believe in equality. In life and death. In the ever existent turning of the earth and the burning heat of the sun.
I believe in equality. In people’s hearts and minds. In the rights that we choose to indulge in. And the ones we choose to ignore.
I believe in equality. In the little things. The common phrases. The not-so-common courtesies that we extend.
I believe in equality. For those who are well respected. For those who barely exist. For those who cannot afford to pay for their own meals.
I believe in equality. As human beings. As men. As women. As whatever the hell you want to be. As whoever you are, have been, and will become.
I believe in equality.

The water can heal you, if you let yourself

                                                     submerge.

The chilly fingers of the melting ice caps

will engulf you

making you feel very small

and very afraid

but then

when you erupt from the depth of self healing

you will feel the warm tendrils of the sun-rays

curling over and caressing your skin.

And everything

will

be okay

once again.

i.

I didn’t want you

but I hadn’t yet learned

how to say no.

ii.

Further educated

completely resistant

yet you took what you wanted from me

iii.

You were a terrible mistake

A horrible

30 second mistake

iv.

You awoke my hunger

and my passion

and I hated you

v.

I wanted you but

not like that

in broad daylight

vi.

your accent

but your attitude

thank god you were a one night stand

vii.

for the first time in years

i felt actual affection

i want you again

I am a disappointment to my mother.
I don’t call when I’ll be coming home late. My room is wreck. I’m not in school, and I work two dead end jobs at places that don’t matter one iota to anyone in my family.
I curse. I smoke. I drink.
I’m a foul mouthed little child that can’t lose weight and sleeps around and never does what she’s told.
I’m a disappointment to my mother,
Despite the years of good behaviour. The good grades, the chaste life, the driven nature that took me half way around the world just to see if I could do it.
I stand in front of her today, still 6 inches shorter. Still rounder, still brunette. Still foul mouthed and still rebellious.
I still hug her tightly as if she’s all I’ve ever had. As if she is the only stability I’ve ever known. As if all those boyfriends who claimed they’d never leave either of us, as if all of those friends she had that I grew to love, and the pets we abandoned, and the apartments we called home, as if all of those things never mattered, or shaped me to be the distrustful little being I am today.
I still look at her like she’s all I have left. I never talk to her about stuff like that because I know it will only make her mad. Her hormonal short temper and her distrust of my judgement. I know I’m young, Mom, that’s why you should let me make my mistakes now, instead of in ten years when I’m married with children and never got to taste what being wrong in every way felt like.
I’m a disappointment to my mother. I want to have bad times. And hard times. I want to be knocked on my *** by life and barely able to get back up. She doesn’t get it.
She never will. I love her. With all that I am I will always love her but that trust that was once only reserved the only person who never left me, never deserted me and never gave up on me, that trust needs to be placed in me.
I am a disappointment to my mother because I grew up, and now I need to be a disappointment to me.

I am the Witch of the Moon

I cast spells for the stars

And they sing me lullabies to sooth me into troubled sleep

I crush herbs in the craters of the moon and scatter their dust across the sky

The universe calls to me and I run

Deep in the caverns of my beloved home

They wish to rip me from Luna

To go traipsing across the stars

With my entrancing words

And whimsical ways

But I only dance in the light of her glow

I only sing when we are alone

for just a few minutes

i’d like to feel

like the only sentient being on the ******* planet

that matters

not to you

but to myself

for ******* once

This is not a poem about love.

I don’t really love that many people.

Not truly, way down deep in my heart.

I guard it. I numb it.

I don’t let it get hurt.

But that’s really just the lie I tell myself so that I feel safe.

I’m easy to pierce and I’m easily broken.

I hang on too tight to things that aren’t always there.

I fantasize.

Not in a *****

Nasty way

But in a way that makes me hope.

Hope that maybe one day this will mean something

We can look back and remember a first touch

A first word

The first time we knew

Or I knew

And then when you did in turn

Or maybe that will all be flipped around

Chronology isn’t important

What matters is that it happens

Eventually

Some day

Sometime

Soon

My heart has never been this broken.

And you’ve broken it before.

This is real.

This is the end.

The last warm glimpse of the humanity
The last time I felt the love that everyone ever told me I deserved
The last time
The last time I let go of everything I never should have given one iota of a **** about

The first time I've been alone
Truly known that solitude felt like
Knowing what I'm missing and replacing it with an entire reality that is completely subpar
Death
Death and knowing nothing at all
Seems to be welcoming most of the time
The last time
The last hour
The last few moments
Aren't they all the same?
The same as any other hour that we have ever been given the grace to live
Death comes early for anyone
There are always more seconds to live
One more conversation of total import that could have been shared
with someone
anyone at all
The last few words that we spoke could have always been followed with an entire recitation of what we wish we could have known
The things we wish could have learned
The people that we never got the chance to love
The ones that were always doomed to lose

Old, we die. "It's our time."
Young, we perish. "What a tragedy."

There is no right or wrong time for a death.
It's not the end of a book or the cease fire of the raging war inside of us.
It continues on in the next generation of who we are.
It continues on after we're gone.

Nothing ever ends completely.
Everyone leaves a legacy.
Sometimes, it's nothing special.
Sometimes, it's a never-ending joke that your friends and family still tell years later, long after they have tragically forgotten that you ever existed.
Sometimes, its a small bit of wisdom that is always prefaced by "Well, my old friend always told me.."

Sometimes, though, it's nothing more than a wisp of emotions. That small secret longing that never gets named. There is no label for it, no way to tell what it is, but it's all that's left after your dead and gone, and it's all you'll ever have.

Though the hours grow fewer

And my dreams ever smaller

I desire the same things

As when I was a child

I want to count every

single

star

while I’m lying in your arms

I want to sing

belt out

every song I’ve ever heard

we used to sound so good together

you and me

against the night

battling the inevitable morning

Take me back to the land of sausage and mustard eggs.
Thick, meaty, juicy hunks of meat. Cylindrical and delicious, I miss the sensation of snapping the end of one off into my mouth fresh off of a grill.
Lounging on the castle lawn. Speaking three different languages in one conversation. Drinking confusing juice and cuddling up next to bonfires and talking all night long.
Sleeping in a cardboard box that needed a little ******. Loving new people every day.
Singing. All day long. Getting the words wrong until the leaves rustled just the right way reminded us what were trying to say.
I miss the Mother Land. The chill mornings and colder afternoons. Frozen over duck ponds and introducing the natives to the glory of tacos.
Ich liebe dich Deutschland. Holen Sie mich Haupt Ihnen.

I've got this slow sinking feeling

In the most golden way possible

I feel you slipping into my life as easily as my last love

The last one that I let in so deep I could barely find all the pieces of him to pull back out once he was gone

There are still bits that linger

That remind me

But I'm not protesting your gradual descent into my heart

I'd rather like to keep you there

My emotions are
     drip
          drip
               dripping
out of my melting heart.

I try to hold them in but my fingers form a mere collandar.

I need a vast cauldron to stew my
ever-changing mind in.

All of my concerns and ideals get confused.
         Jumbled.
                        Befuddled.
                                                      And twisted around .
I wish life was a straight line sometimes.
So that my eyes knew which direction to shine in.

I’ve forgotten how to fall.

Completely let go and let myself

plummet

into your inevitability

I’ve forgotten how to be overwhelmed

by you

your eyes

your hands

the way I feel when I can’t tell if warmth of the sheets is from my heated nature or yours

My tangled emotions come out in all the wrong order

I’m sorry I’m a little crazy

My ****** up heart makes me think I’m losing my mind sometimes

I may never pull myself together

and climb out of this rut forever

but at least I know

how I feel about you

Every time I sit down with the intention of expunging thoughts from my jumbled up and cloudy mind
The wires get tangled
The letters mush together into pictograms that I can't decipher

My intentions and my feelings come out in a foreign way
I don't even understand what they're trying to say and
it's
so
maddening
to realize that I can't even communicate with myself

Am I declining into insanity?
Or am I just far more smitten with you than I even let myself believe?

Your presence wraps around me and nothing else matters.
When I feel you near, I am happy.
And it ****** me off.

Sometimes I want to rage
and grump
and pout
and there are so many things about you that make me want to just smile and say it's okay
even when it's a lie

So when I lash out and strike you
when I get snippy and short of tongue
I'm just trying to stay grounded in my ever overwhelming emotional state

I'm just trying to stay sane
Even though the overwhelming thought of you nearly bursts my membrane
You've turned my poems to **** and my heart to sludge
and
I love you.

Deep and dark emotions always creep out at the worst times
When you're trying to sleep
When you're out to eat
Or when you're trying to be intimate with someone you love so deeply
you just might burst
There is nothing romantic about it
The sudden flood of tears
The shaking hands and the clumsy fingers
Foggy eyes can't aim well
with their words or their intentions
Most times it just seems easier to resign into solitude and give it up
throw in the towel
I'm not fit for the human interaction that I crave with my
heart
my soul
my mind
my very skin buzzes with the thought of someone
Someone just as damaged as I am
Someone just as loved as I'm supposed to feel
Someone just as sad
and unwilling to talk about it
The happy little life tinged with the bittersweet tears of healing and the
sad tug of what has been left behind
Nostalgia is clinging to my heels
though I've kicked her in the head a few times
Her bouncing ******* and swaying hips still follow me to and fro
as if hooked to me by an two ton invisible chain
Seductive as a politicians *******,
She is so intent on getting her way that she forgets that I'm the original, and she's the copy.
The cartoonishly overdrawn ideal of who I once was. The love hungry blue heart that had no true place in the world.

But once you've found your place in the galaxy, no earth dwelling ***** could even try to keep you around.

My heart bleeds darkness

It leaks and oozes the memories I don’t let myself remember

It aches with the sound of my inner child sobbing

Screaming and throwing fits to be let out

My heart bleeds the sadness that I hold inside

It trickles through sometimes

That’s when you see me cry

My heart aches with all my untold troubles

The ones behind the things I pretend to let bother me

The little things that I don’t really care about I just pretend to show emotion so that no one will know that I’m really a robot

With screws and metal bits instead of blood and viens

I don’t care about anything anymore beyond getting through

I can climb the mountain just fine as long as everyone leaves me alone

I’ll catch a ride on the wings of my depression

It will glide me effortlessly back down to the valley of blame and guilt and remorse and I’ll stay there

I’ll wallow there in the lush grass of melancholy

I’ll roll around with the dripping words of the ones who want me to stay

They whisper my defeat from the tops of the hills and yet I can hear them

Their words settle and sink into my very soul until I can no longer even muster the energy walk to the water to drink

I cannot sustain my own life

My lonliness is what ruins the rest of me

The last thing I want to give up

My solitude

It’s what will **** me in the end

Dragging me down into the cave at the bottom of the valley I will lie in the fetal position until I starve to death

Lack of human interaction

Lack of human affirmation

I will never survive alone

As much as that sounds like a negative thing to me

I suppose it’s really not

I can bring light into other people’s lives

As long as someone is bringing light into mine

It’s a chain reaction

Love me

I’ll love everyone else for you

Cherish me

And I can make the world shine brighter than the sun

When people are far away, it doesn’t mean we stop loving them.

But it’s a different sort of love.

An ache in your heart, and in your thoughts, when they come up in conversation.

A small lump in your throat when you think about how long it’s been since you’ve seen them, or hugged them, or even gotten a text from them.

It’s that single tear you shed when you get a meaningful voicemail after you missed their 4th call in two days because of timezones or work schedules or weird sleeping patterns you hadn’t even realized you’d developed since the last time you were a part of their lives.

It’s forgetting what they, specifically, look like but still remembering how they smell. And how their hand feels in yours.

Just because they aren’t near you, or living life with you day to day anymore, doesn’t mean you can’t love them just as much.

It’s possible that you love them even more. Their everyday mistakes aren’t around to remind you that they aren’t perfect. Their little slip ups won’t unconsciously disappoint you, nor will their poorly timed jokes and indiscreet innuendos make you feel uncomfortable in the presence of others.

Instead you have all of your memories together that are worth keeping around.

And the solid truth that you do so want to see your loved one again.

You are my forgiveness. My long lost way out of this eternal labyrinth of suffering. I have never let someone grow so close to my heart before you.

I have never let anyone hurt me so deeply before you did.

And I certainly never forgave anyone for hurting me like that.

Before you.

You are my forgiveness.

You opened my eyes to the fact that just because I was hurt, doesn’t mean you did it to hurt me.

You never wanted to do that but that didn’t change that you thought what you were doing was right.

We still argue about it sometimes.

But you are my forgiveness.

Just because I know that that hurt was deep

and real

more real than any hurt I have received since was little more than an infant

doesn’t mean that I have to hold it against you

or against myself

I love you eternally.

Growing apart for us doesn’t have to be inevitable

Maturing and changing

Becoming more of who life is shaping us to be

That doesn’t mean that our closeness still isn’t meant to be

If I do nothing else great with my life

nothing of import or worthy of notice

I will go to my grave with the satisfaction of knowing that I did not let my relationships follow the pattern of societal acceptance.

I will hold on to people I have known forever, for loyalties sake.

For love’s sake.

I will never stop loving you, or them, so why should I let the warmth between us die just because friendships don’t “usually” last that long?

When I’m 30, I want you to call me old and laugh.

When you’re 40, I’m going to dye your hair completely grey instead of back to black.

When you finally have those little offshoots called children, they will call me auntie and I will let them name any kittens my hoard of cats is likely to have

When I finally pop a few out, you will be their stern uncle, that warns them against the flighty ways of their ever errant mother

Telling them stories of drunken nights and bad decisions

Scaring them with almost too many details about who we both used to be

Our matching pair of German Shepherds  and our almost identical college diplomas will always remind us of where we came from and how far we’ve come down

The road out of the labyrinth.

My voice carries most passion
than the entire rest of my being
If I could but write a song
compose something
so true
and so personal to myself
I could sing it over and again
whenever I feel emotionally restrained
and feel the relief that I have so longed for
most of my days
and every single **** one of my nights

Everything I do
It's all wrapped up in you
It's like our thoughts are on the same baking sheet, running together as the heat increases
Forming one big lump of something delicious
I was just trying to finagle my way into getting there
And now you're going
Alone
Alone for a whole month
Maybe you'll be better when you're back
Maybe you'll want me around again
I understand needing space but you clearly aren't living in solitude
That's what hurts I guess
The other people you're surrounding yourself with
You'd rather them, than me
They've been toxic for years
I've been a salve for the last one
I'm still confused
I'm still sad
I will probably still cry for hours and make bad decisions with even worse people
You won't be there when I need you because I'll be too scared to talk to you when I can't handle life
I won't want you there when I cry because I'll be crying over you
Over
and
Over
and over.
The memories replay in my mind
No more late night excursions into further knowing each other and wandering around never getting lost because you always know where you are.
No more late night talks about anything.
No more I love yous.
No more texts that make me laugh in inappropriate situations.
No more small encouragements when I feel at my worst.
I miss you like you're gone. Even though I know you're not.
But while
I may be dead to you

The worst part is

I’m dead inside

Of course I still care

about you

I love you

until there is no more of me left

I will love you

I will always be sad when I think of you

And remember that we were supposed to be those special

Forever

Friends

I will always mourn the misunderstanding that ended us

The ridiculous notion that I didn’t appreciate you for exactly who you were

For the person that lives inside of you

Just waiting for you to discover him

I won’t let him die.

I will keep him alive in my heart and I will love him until the end of all that I know

I will never stop loving you

I’m breaking half thinking about you

Jack helps

But he’s an expensive friend to keep around

I’m thinking of checking out

Just leaving everyone behind and becoming someone no one will recognize

I’m a fan of that

I’m a fan of being something totally different for the time being

Taking the time to know that it’s not who I am

But what I do

That drives people away

Because you don’t deserve me right now

You don’t deserve to realize that I’m actually pretty great

I will remember everything you say

I will take it all to heart

And I will shower you with love when you let me

But for now

I’m gone
And
As the nicotine numbs my lips
And everyone tells me I’m better off

I deserve better
I don’t need you

That you’re being spiteful 

And mean

I can’t accept it 

Even though you’ve ripped out my heart 

And part of my soul

Grinding them up into dust 

I can’t listen to people put you down

I can’t accept what they are saying 

Shame on me

For thinking so little of myself 

If anyone else had done this to me 

You’d be furious 

Yelling at me about all the same things everyone is telling me about you 

Love and blood and sweat and tears be ****** 

I won’t let you break me 

It doesn’t matter that I’m doing it for who I thought you were
It matters that its happening