Let my arms only ever be for holding.

Let me live with open hands,
Let the skin on my palms stay soft,
Let me not hold too lightly to anything in this life.

Give me a heart full of light,
Let me love what I have when I have it
And let me smile when it goes.

Let my heart be full of gratitude
When my arms are around you,
Let me accept when they are empty.

Let me press my ear to the hollow of your chest,
Let me hear the ocean between the heartbeats.

Let your bed be the Garden of Eden
And let my stray hairs be fruit in the sheets.

Let my moans be hymns for you.
Let us be sinners made clean.

Let us be healed,
Let us be beautiful.

Let this stay.

You can get tattoos removed
And that in itself is proof
That things that you thought would last forever
May not be so.

When I was younger, I longed to be beautiful. To have shiny hair, soft skin, collarbones poking through my flesh.
Now that I'm older, I want to burn hearts with intelligence and warm souls with compassion. I want to boil blood with wit and spark imaginations with creativity. I want to soak up the rays of sunny praise for my artwork and poetry rather than my eyes and lips.
I am not programmed with a self destruct button, but calling me beautiful for the wrong reasons is the second best thing.

One day you'll grow up
And your eyes will stop reflecting galaxies
And start reflecting the weather.

You
Are the sum
Of your experiences,
And it's how you respond
To those experiences
That define you.
But boy,
You better be relentless with me
Because our desires do not define,
They confine.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

People 'round here only leave town
To be buried somewhere quieter.
I hope you understand why I run from them.

I am nothing but a carcass,
Gorgeously corroding,
A mind that slowly decays over time
And flesh that mimicks my insides.
And within a couple short centuries
I will be nothing but dust,
memories,
And a cracked headstone.

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.

You have skin made out of steel
But that's a good thing, I guess,
Considering how the pressure of your hand feels on my thigh
And how it holds the weight of the entire sea.

This is the song
That makes you cry every time,
The one you play on repeat
To punish yourself.

This is the pattern you've trapped yourself in.

This mantra,
This melody,
"This is what you get"

These scars you wear,
The heaviness you harbour
"This was never what you wanted"

How many symptoms
before it's
a sickness?

Stay still,
Keep quiet,
You are shattering yourself
Inside.

Tell her in another world you're close enough to hold her
Tell her about your affinity for that which is not manmade but is still breakable
Tell her she's malleable in a way that makes things afraid to touch her
Tell her how you misspelled "perfection" using the letters of her name
Tell her you don't want to drink unless it's from the dips of her collarbones
Tell her she's your favourite China shop
Tell her you knew she liked it rough
Tell her she'll shatter under the weight of your softness
Tell her she's not like the other girls before her
Tell her she's the question and the answer
Tell her she's more light than tunnel
Tell her she's art
Tell her she makes you believe in God
But just don't tell her you still call me when you're drunk

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.

Lately there have been days where I catch myself looking for you in the strangest places;
In train stations, sanctuaries, the corners of your room that you never set foot in,
And there have been days where I feel so small that just leaving my bed seems like the bravest thing I've ever done.
I blame it on the way you seem to swallow my darkness without absorbing it,
The way my chest tightens at the thought of your touch,
The way I cradle the ashes of what we once were.
We ruined each other with passion and fire,
And there are days where that fire still burns in my chest, migrates to my head,
And my skull begins to feel like a whiskey glass in a bar fight.
These days no one ever tells you about the difference between heat and warmth,
You learn it yourself when his hands scorch your skin and his fire burns through you
While he pours lighter fluid down your throat.
I wake up as a stranger in my body these days and I whisper to the mirror, "I just want to go home"
And thoughts of you remind me of how to get there.
It seems like we're straddling the line between love and Stockholm syndrome
And it's automatic for me to call you by your sins rather than your name,
But these are the days when I need you to lap up this nectar and hear this truth,
As well as all the blurred intentions behind every "I miss you."

Every poem I wrote,
I wrote for you;
To try and erase
The wounds you left.

Today
I am writing for me,
Because I have realized
That these wounds will never
Disappear.

They will stay.

They will scar.

And they will be beautiful.

They will be gashes
In my flower petal skin
Sealed with gold,
Lacing me back together.

They will spill sunlight
And music
And all the venom
That you have filled me with
Will dissolve.

I will be new.

I will be fresh.

I will grow new
Flower petal skin.

There is no more whiskey
Left in my blood;
There is no more reason
To beg you to come home.

I am not a child,
I am
A woman king;

A flower who has been
Whiskey dipped.

And, regardless,
I have bloomed.

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.

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.

If you make me beg for it
I will make sure
You will be begging me to stop.

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.

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.

Isn't it ironic that
The feeling of abandonment
Doesn't know
How to leave you?

There's something about how you treat my heart as a doormat,
As a place to wipe the mud off of your shoes,
And how the floors are always spotless.

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?

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

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

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

I am the poem
On the roof of your mouth
Caught in your throat,
I am whirring in your stomach
In the soles of your shoes
In the ground beneath you.
I am everything you wish to say
To bring to the surface
And make tangible.
The whiskey in your hand makes you brave
Maybe this time you'll let me loose?
Maybe this time you'll open my cage door
And be honest with yourself?
Maybe not.
Imagine what we would be like
If we knew how to be honest
Without being drunk first.

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.

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?

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

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.

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're more concerned with finding out who drew blood first
Than you are with the fact that I'm still bleeding.

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.

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

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.

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.

Whiskey keeps my heart alive,
But disintegrates my mind.
Its a fair trade, I guess.

I feel nothing but a heartbeat in my head
When your hands are doors closing around my throat,
Trying to force your name from these lips.
Instead I bite my tongue and pretend to enjoy
The taste of the blood filling my mouth.
I much prefer the taste of it
To the lie you so desperately want me to feed you.
I'll keep my liquor lips from you,
I won't allow you to get drunk off of my kisses.
I won't allow the blood flowing through my teeth
To pass from my mouth to yours.
True love is biting your tongue
And pretending you don't mind the taste of blood.

Did you know
That if your lover cracks your ribs
Just right,
You can almost hear God softly saying
That he's sorry?
The bruises on my torso
And the "Get Well Soon" cards
That are arranged on my mantel
Are proof.