i see myself:

a
little tiny girl,
tear stained, broken..
.
pressed up against a glass
window that some might
call
a mirror,

and
submerged like a castle
in a fish tank, i
watch the way
that
little me swims
above
pretty little rainbow beads
and
picks at affection,
somehow
dropped from
the sky..
.

its
blue, pink, and
green;
and
there's a face in the clouds:

like rain, i
cry. looking down at
what once was..
.

and i remember why
that little girl
died.

Too bad
Saint Valentine didn't weep
on the grave
you left in
heaven;

as you were
plucked
from the thousand poppies
of little lost girls
dressed in blue,
white, and
yellow.

and
even now, i know:
(that) you're not from here,
crying pink balloons
and little white
strings-

still attached to your eyes,
they
float right back up
and pop, when
they hit they sky,

and maybe,
maybe
it shows,
you just weren't built for
flying.

Don't make me laugh
you
sick
sack of meat-/rotting
in the city's
yellow
sun... don't claim you
were
broken,
by a boy who never
loved
you,
because it's so easy to
see
why.

i want to be smaller.
tiny, tinier, tiniest.

i want to be so small, that
i fit into a jar, and
can hide in the walls of
houses i never called
home,

maybe if i cut out some
stuffing, i will be satisfied.

my back
will slump forward and you
will see my spine, but i
will be smaller,
less open,
less
there..
.

and i will cease to exist,,,
almost
an empty shell of skin and
zipper, collapsed on the
floor, maybe my lungs will still
breathe.:

die, died, will die.
i want to be dead.

Step one starts with forgetting/

you begin by tearing
yourself from the skin they took home in,
disconnecting your arms from their seams,
eating their hearts
and hoping that they forget you,
too

Step two means burning all
ties,
dissolving each memory like the pills
your mother took at breakfast,
how could you have let this happen?

so you pull
their
veins from yours and
untangle what they gave you,
choke down a penny
and hope
that they don't think of
you

Step three is the
detox,
cut yourself open and scrub yourself
shiny:::
unchain your wrists from that dinner table
and hope that his nightlight doesn't bleed
through
that
doorway,

orange was never a pretty color
anyway

Step four is the hardest,
.
when you take a knife to your palm,
and make slits down to your wrist,

when you ignore the beck and call
of memories you forgot you had,
people you realize never cared,
so you take
a drink for those you know you've
long forgotten,

and come clean
to three different people, all the
same and hope the next girl
doesn't know step one....

it never seemed to hurt when you
played it all out in your head.

happy New Years to
the girls like me,
who forgive and forget as if
yesterday didn't hurt
and tie knots over wounds
like they lace up shoes


happy New Years to
all the boys who still cry
at night, over
their fathers who don't love them
and things they were never
taught to say

and happy New Years to
everyone in between, to those
who can't tell black from
white,
good from bad, and still don't
know
how to dress at night

tomorrow might be better.

i want to be loved so bad

it took a long time to feel okay again

no one in the world is as nice as me