When your body is under the weather,
your eyes are foggy and dead like leather,
and those eyes keep raining, pouring, and dribbling down the sides of your sunken face,
like it's a race to see which droplet will come in first place.

The pitter-patter on your lap of the rain falling from above
feeds a pool forming between your thighs and your stomach.

The weathermen keep on reporting storms.
At least you have some warning.
The lightning flashes and blinds you,
and the thunder clashes and deafens you.

You can't hear the world around,
you're too drowned.

We haven’t spoken since March.
Now, isn’t that perfectly depressing?
I think about it a lot.
I think about it while I stare out of the bus windows,
While I let everything rush in and pile on top of me…
the images and trees flitting by…
the flashes of memories of your face, your smile, and your voice.

Everything about you is right beside me,
but I know you’re not really here.
You would never stay around me this long, right, friend?
I’d stay beside you, right there…
maybe forever, if that’s what you need.

Your ungainly hug still leaves warm spots on my shoulders and my side.
I swear that I can still feel you leaning against me.
I know I can still feel the painful knot in my throat, which I tried to hide.
Your embrace:
it made me feel shorter than you, even though we were the same height,
and it made me feel warm even though I was cold,
when it was around eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
It almost made me happy, but I also wanted to cry.
Because it was making me really see that I was saying goodbye.

Give me the courage to alter my mind;
give me the tolerance to revamp what has been intertwined,
deep within the tangle of my twisted heart and my aberrant judgement.
I need the diligence to become what people wish, and become content
with simply being as they want.
It will not matter: the severity of my becoming gaunt.

I need your truthful words,
untouched by filthy lies,
flying from your mouth like graceful and pure birds.

With your speech,
tell me I can change!
My filthy, mendacious walls, you breach,
with the promise that I will change.

Strip the cloth off of my scarred skin,
to show me what has been,
of scarred and bruising flesh,
so that I can feel it afresh.
A reminder that I must become something else.

Please talk to me again so that I can remember who I am torturing myself for.
Give me more- give me more-
more- more of a reminder!
For you, I'll be a beggar,
begging on the road for you to repair my soul,
begging for you to make me whole.

Dizzying intoxication,
torturous obsession,
what could a fourteen-year-old know about addiction?

It never stops,
for one,
it's like an ugly mythological cyclops,
with an eye only for a prize,
wishing it had two eyes,
so it could see more of the world.

Dizzying intoxication,
torturous obsession,
hooked on clenching jaws,
riding on the high of fixing each of the wicked flaws,

Who said that this is not an addiction?
A terrifying one, but maybe they all are...
Addicted to pain of emptiness, both physical and mental,
leaving nasty scar upon nasty scar.

I regret falling to the addiction,
of sick and thin,
but like I said, I'm here to win,
so I'll succumb to addiction...

Cough up your lungs and cough up your guts,
and heal up your cuts!
Sickness wracks your body,
your ribs show when you cough and gag.
Hold up your white flag,
because you surrender to the infection.

You're cut open and sewed shut,
prepare yourself for rejection.
You can't handle another infection.
Surgery can't fix you up inside,
this disease isn't attacking anywhere a doctor can reach,
nor any speech.

You're in ill health,
that creeps up with great stealth.
Your sickness is using your tongue
to choke out each lung,
while lying
and denying
that you're sick.

Throw the white sheets over your head,
you'll be with the dead,
because you have to surrender to the infection!
let it reside within your midsection,
because it will achieve perfection!

Once upon a time,
I taught myself to rhyme.

I would hum as I tried to climb,
and though the branches beneath my feet were hard,
from the ground by them I was barred,
and their marred bark seemed to melt into a part of me.

I taught myself to rhyme
when I lay awake at night,
and wished I could take flight.

Mother, a specialist has called us,
he believes something is wrong, astray, askew,
but you tell me it's all no reason to fuss.
Mother, your words have caught onto me like the flu.
Mother, you're infecting me to become you.

Father, mother says we cannot go,
to neither the recommended counseling nor therapy,
and for some reason you agree,
but just yesterday you told me,
you resent what she has done to your children.

Mother, I am sorry you have overheard what I've told my dad.
I promise, I never meant to make you sad,
but now you're screaming that I'm glad.
Mother, I do not rejoice!
Please, stop putting these words in my mouth! It is your choice!

Mother, this ordeal can end.
Remember, you were once my friend?
Mother, I know I have grown to fourteen and now I should be more kind and more mature.
Still, you say, I am just mean and for my cold eyes and empty heart, there is no cure.
Mother, your words shape my world, despite my hesitance to believe them.

Mother, I am sorry that I sobbed three years ago because of your screams.
Mother, I am sorry that I turned my back on you while we both fell through countless seams.
Mother, forgive me, please, for I try my best and I am your daughter.
Mother, forgive me, please, for I try my best and I am not my father.

Father, I miss your defense.
But to expect your words in my good chance again is dense.
Father, I have made every excuse I can to make you the favorite parent.
But, father, my lies to myself are apparent.
Father, what happened to the days when your guarded this wretched child of myself from mother's verbal onslaught?
Forever I would have you for forever, I thought.

Father, you will die soon, because you do not care for your body.
Father, I cannot live without you beside me and my family.
Father, protect my brothers and my sisters just a few more years.
Father, don't leave me again yet. You are not him, do not run for a few more beers.

Mother, you brought to me an alcoholic.
Mother, you brought to me his precious child.
Mother, with this baby, now nearly four years old, I still frolic.
My beloved little sister.
But mother, the drunkard threatens to come to us again.
If he tries in court to steal my cherished sister, can we win?

Rapacious alcoholic, with each and every bone in my body, for you, I feel such loathing.

From a mouth tasting sour from an empty stomach, and whispering from dry, cracked lips, comes desperate pleas.
Perhaps they beg for silence, or simply to be heard, but either way no desert will speak and each mouth is certainly one of these.
Each tongue is white and wrung out, then hung out to dry.
There are still always screams, and the sound of fighting, so speakers must settle to merely cry.

From red eyes, with vibrant and bright irises and endless pupils, tears threaten to slip mutely down sunken cheeks.
Silent criers with departed, desensitized beacons embedded in their faces do not plea for help nor quiet to reflect their own demeanor.
Simply secreting their eyes, they wish to see no more.
Oh, they've seen too much to continue watching!
So they press their hands to their sockets and let their tears continue splotching.

From hands, with scarred knuckles and only callused skin, there slip the tears that forced their ways between eyelids.
Something terrifying, opposing grabs at small palms and nimble fingers.
Hands tugging and pulling, they escape their bane.
Hands shaking and numbing, they begin to dull the pain.

And in their brain, chemicals and hormones cry out for the body and the mind to stop racing,
but their body image and their self esteem and worth are rapidly defacing.
Oh, this act of suicide is quite technically a crime.

I feel that I am the last thing on their mind.
That is not said as if I am the last thing that they think of at night.
I am saying this as if I am the last in the queue of those they deem important. I'm the least concerning subject.
So ask anyone and everyone and everyone and nobody (with a clear conscience) would object.

I can tell you now, so often I tend to see them.
They occupy the empty pocket between bone and brain,
and they fill the blue emptiness of sky reflected in my eyes.
Are they so oblivious? Do they just ignore this?

For however awkward I already am, and probably will always be,
they never seem to notice how I start to stutter more,
or how I try to disappear when they're near.

I stare, though, it must be clear as day.
I take in details about their face, so familiar that if I tried I could trace it into the clay.
But at the same time, if I try to remember, I picture nothing but their gaze.

I'm not lovesick for the girl,
who I call adorable.
I don't feel shy for the older one who hugs me and smiles my way in the hallways.
I don't pine for the boy who I admire for his personality at times.

I think I love the one who held purple petals out to me as a joke,
but I stuck beside for the night, still with other friends but always staring at him.
I think this time I'm just feeling for someone who caught me off guard when I realized what I've been thinking.