I like to call
The blood dripping from my mouth
Poetry,
But everyone can see
The scarlet drops
For what they truly are;
A death wish
And a drunken kiss.

When you are not looking
Someone will quietly step beside you
And the air will change
And your blood will course redder
And time
Will slowly
Stop.

Pressing my hands into the asphalt is the closest that I'll ever come
To holding your hand again,
And I'm still sorry for using your heart as an example
Of how some things
Can shatter noiselessly.

I tell you I'm in pain and you ask me where it hurts
So I point to the packed bag that is sitting by the door.

They told me to paint what I felt
So I left the canvas
Blank.

I made a god out of the way your hand fit to the small of my back.
My prayers were watching the sunlight dance on your bare skin as you slept.
My hymns were your short, heavy breaths and the way you sighed my name.
I tried in vain to be your church but your chest burned at the sound of every hallelujah.
I was a fool to think you would answer desperate prayers made on knees bent in dirt.

You may have took my ability to belong to a person
And cracked it in half
But I'm better at bleeding whiskey than I ever was
Before.

Sometimes when I think of you, my lungs feel like they're shrinking and I imagine your voice in my head
Telling me that you still think about me in that dress.
Sometimes when I'm kept awake at night, I imagine you're having trouble sleeping too
Because the weight of my hand is not holding you still.
Sometimes I get so tired of waking up alone with the lights on and my heart in my throat,
That I can't help but imagine a million ways to tell you that I love you
Without using the actual words.
But did I ever tell you about the day I woke up as a fire?
Or how the voice that echoed in my skull once told me, "This is what you are now"?

I am burning alive,
I am screaming, "Fire",
And I am holding the lighter.

Some days I get so scared that I feel it throughout my entire body
And I feel too heavy to move.
I've been trying to retrace my steps for years,
Trying to recall where I buried the body of the girl I once dreamed of becoming,
But I am paralyzed with terror when I realize how gentle you are
And that I want to fill your lungs with whispers of poetry, your ribcage with hand-picked wildflowers, and your mind with thoughts of me in that dress.
If I could just make you feel a fraction of this war in my chest then maybe
You could see why I am in love with the sunlight that is pouring out of your mouth
But I'm too busy chasing shadows to admit it.
Some day all this pain will be so beautiful to us,
But until then,
Don't expect to show up at my doorstep with your heart in your hands and have me cup your face and welcome you home,
I have a terrible habit of locking the door.

We are children with skinned knees and hope for tomorrow
Tucked into our back pockets.
Children with selfish wants who are blindly stumbling.
Children of the sun, children caught between the cracks.
Children who are sloppy in love with people
Who don't love us back.
Children with hands stretched out like daggers towards the moon.
Children begging for the ability to weaponize our words.
Children carved from granite and marble,
Laced with gold and stardust
And we just want to be heard.

He so desperately wishes
That he could be
A storm cloud,
For I have learned
That I am no good
At hearing whispers.
You must come at me
With the power of a hurricane.

Draw forest fires into my skin
Set me ablaze with your fingertips
Ignite me with everything we've ever been
Burn with me

I want to feel the build at the tip of your tongue,
I want to feel you move through me in waves
That detonate the pleasure running through my body.
I want to feel the bubbles skimming their way
Up my blossoming body,
Creating pathways made for your palms,
For your perfect fingers,
For your uniquely possessing touch.
I want to feel your lips linger on my sunbathed skin
As I trace patterns with my fingernails into your flesh.
I want to feel your love scorch me inside and out
While your fingers burn,
Destroying me
In the most beautiful way I could imagine.

I want to hold you,
Much like the way spring holds a flower,
And kiss your petals
In the same fashion that the rain
Kisses the ocean
While you bloom in my arms.

I'm sorry for all of the nights
I would go swimming in bottles
and not your eyes.

We swallow these pills
And we swallow our pride
And we swallow our tongues
And we swallow the truth,
All the while pretending
We don't feel the burn
As they slide down our throats.
Choke down this nectar,
This sweetness,
I want it to set your tongue on fire.
You need to take it all
In unrecommended doses.
All these pills,
All these lies,
All these hearts;
Swallow them and taste the heat
And watch as they crawl
Back out of our mouths
And set our lives ablaze
with melancholic thoughts.

How many people can jump before a bridge begins to hate itself?

Aren't you tired of painting yourself black and blue
Every time words fall short of the fire burning behind your eyes?

I apologize in advance for spilling my boiled blood on the floor of your bedroom
But I am running out of ways to show you the wax and whiskey running through these veins.
I'm sorry for showing up at your doorstep with every watch I could carry
But I needed to show you how the clocks laugh every time you tell me "forever".
I may not be pretty enough for you but I promise
I can shatter every mirror until I look like something Picasso would stutter at.
It seems like I'm down to my very last petal but if you give me a moment
I could gather the fallen ones from my feet and arrange them on your mattress
And pull you down to it by your hips to show you how much I adore you.

You kiss me with her name hidden under your tongue
And I pretend that I can't taste her.

Rumor has it
That if you turn the moon upside down
And shake the change from its pockets
You'll almost have enough
To buy back the time that you lost.

Unfamiliar sounds,
The scent of a city
Where too many people have
No place to go.
I have been here before
Standing at the edge,
The edge of a place
I am unable to name.
I am homeless with them,
And as they pray for change,
I pray for arms
That once made me feel
Like I belong.

I am a hole
No substance
No matter
Nothing matters.
"You matter."

The only thing that has any weight to it
Is you,
It's you who holds me down
And stops me from floating away
Into the abyss of
Stoic thoughts
That tumble through my mind.

My lungs are shrinking with the pain of missing you;
You seem so far away
Even though you're beneath my fingers,
And the only thing running through my mind
Is your voice
Saying, "You can't be a child forever."

When he holds me, I become small.
When he looks at me, my confidence disintegrates.
When he kisses me,
I can feel the weight of his lips
Holding me down
From everything.
"Yes I can," I reply.

Do you know what it's like
To live a life
Shoved to my knees,
Begging a dysfunctional God
To condemn me always
To the darkness
To the silence
To the numbness
Of a life without a heart?

No matter what I write
Or how I write it,
Nothing will sound as beautiful to me
As the sounds you make
When I touch you.

Do you know how many times I've begged someone not to disappear?
Do I need to show you the burn marks on my throat?
I'm tired of being all bitten tongues and twisted hearts and
Keeping shovels in every room of the house in case something needs to be buried.

I'll stop pretending
Like I know how to love something
Without making it bleed
If you stop pretending
That you don't practice leaving.

I just want to play with your hair
And kiss your forehead
And share in this silence that no one else can have
Because it's ours.

The only memories I seem to have
Are of how perfect you are,
And how perfect your hands felt on my bare skin,
And how perfect the heart you drew on my chest was,
And how perfect I felt when you told me
That I was perfect
Despite the fact that we both knew
It was a lie.

Thoughts of loving me aren't so hard
With a gun barrel in between your teeth
But I guess I just wasn't meant
To be loved up close.

You said you'd love me til the end
And I constantly find myself wondering
When it all ended for you.

One day my life became a book
Written in a language I couldn't understand
And I'm still learning how to decipher
The pages I keep finding sprewn about in the dark.

Poetry loses it's gravity
When you realize that there's nothing
You could possibly write
To make someone
Love you back.

When the world asks for a quiet place to sleep
I will tell it to travel to the time when I realized
You weren't coming back
And have it watch as I spit out all these broken silences
And call it poetry.

I curse at the rain
And all the miles in between us
And the way the silence seems to swell
Without your heartbeat to fill it.
I used to never get angry
But since you've left
I've been unfurling rage from my mouth
Like an endless magic scarf.
What am I supposed to do
With all this love in my chest?
Where am I supposed to put
All these poems that I wrote you?
I know the rubble at my feet says otherwise,
But I swear I have the capacity to be gentle,
Let me prove it.
I have been so many different people in my life
But I keep trying in vain
To find the one that you loved momentarily.
I want to be the storm raging in your ribcage,
I want to be the secret you can't keep to yourself,
I want to be the only shape that you pray to,
And I want you to tell me to breathe
So maybe I can find the breath that you've knocked from my lungs
So many poems ago.
Wrap your hands around my throat
And claim sanctuary like you mean it
So that this hell can become home to me once again.

You wake in a crowded room
Filled with versions of yourself that have died
Because they were never loved,
And suddenly you realize
Why you're there, too.

Everyone says
That the world could not survive without art;
Then why is it
That the artist is struggling to survive in this world?

If I truly am made from hollowed out bottles
You will be able to see through me
In just the right light.

One day
There is going to be someone
Who will crack your heart in half,
And I'm sorry if I'm the first
To warn you about it.

I've been scrawling secrets on the undersides of stranger's welcome mats
And I've been running out of ways to tell you that I need you to come home.

I want to describe the colour of your eyes
To someone who has only ever known
Black and white.

My father told me
Not to talk to strangers,
So I haven't looked in the mirror
Since.

I wonder if she knows about the collection of hearts you keep inside your closet
And I wonder if she can tell mine apart from the rest.

I never thought of you as an addiction
But then again,
I never thought cigarettes would be a problem for me either.

Was it ever real?
The way we felt about that person?

Or was it a projection of something we needed, or something we wanted regardless of their emotions?

Filling the void is a task best left to the emotionless.

I, myself, had always had a complicated relationship with emotions. I either felt it all, or felt emptiness/blankness/nothingness.

Frighteningly, it was mostly the latter.

I want only to fill it, terrified that it'll destroy me, eat me alive. I fear the annihilation. The silent erasure.

But to fill it, I have to sacrifice another. I have to offer up the warm blood of a lamb to the cold gods of my chest.

I've watched his heart break. I've seen his eyes go dark. I've felt the winds change.

I'm so sorry.

But I love myself more.

I think the place to start isn't so much about asking whether it was real, but to question if it was love I was looking for initially.

I wish I could accept the nothingness and be satisfied without having to put anyone else in it.

I'm so sorry.

This is the white light you've heard about, the one you're supposed to see at the end of the tunnel.

This is the apology owed to you, the one you were begging for when they dragged your knuckles across the asphalt.

This is the fresh air filling your lungs, after years of spitting up water hoping to make room for it.

This is your reflection, the one you avoided by shattering every gleaming surface.

This is your favourite poem, the one you read every night like a prayer.

This is everything you wanted, everything you swore you needed to be better.

So why are you still picking at your ****** knuckles?

Why are you pretending you haven't memorized that poem?

Why won't you look your reflection in the eyes?

Why are you holding your breath?

Why won't you be better?