Most nights are spent wrestling heavy eyelids
Until exhaustion starts fighting to win.
Between sheets I begin to feel myself drifting
While REM sleep slowly starts settling in.
My sleeping mind never had a warm greeting
Always unwelcoming, unsettling, and dark;
And as always, I am met with the familiar feeling
Of the awareness of the speed of my heart.
Within the hellish depths of my subconscious,
I grip tight to my connection to reality
But even as I tighten my grip,
I feel myself slip
With ****** hands, I succumb to defeat.
And in the darkness I feel myself tremble
With my blood running cold through my veins
The line between hallucination and awake
Start to become impossible to differentiate
Come what may, I’ll be ready to fight my way out
Of this sleep cycle induced test of will
And until the sun starts to rise
I’ll shorten my breath and try to keep still.
For whatever hides around that dimly lit corner
Will not meet me with any remorse.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned,
It’s that the unacknowledged
Will find me and take me by force.
And despite the painfully relentless nights
There’s always a hidden silver lining;
I get to look forward to the rare occasions
When around the corner a light is shining,
All apprehension and nerves are gone
And wrapped in the warmth of safety,
Breathing will come easy
Until the horizon is painted with colors of dawn

The second you sunk your teeth into my neck, I should have known
That each time your mouth grazed my throat and collarbones
You were ******* the life right through my veins
And injecting venom into my bloodstream to replace it.
I've learned now that the wings I felt fluttering in my gut
Were no more than the moths that took up residency when I felt alone,
You simply stirred them up.
They were trying to warn me.
But like a child, I confused them for butterflies and looked at you like home.
You were a view that left me blind
And I felt it burn each time your fingertips traced my skin
But I'm starting to notice the scars it left behind.
They tell me:
The monsters among us hide in plain view
Disguised as lovers
Or friends
Or relatives
Or you.
And in retrospect, the signs **** near screamed in my face
But I kept hitting 'snooze' on the alarm that the warning sirens replaced.
It's too late to duck and cover now,
I'm already surrounded by debris
I can't recall the explosion itself
The flash was blinding and the shockwave deafened me.
Covered in ash and rubble, I'm left to find my way through the smoke.
Coughing up blood and rubbing dirt from my eyes,
I'll find a way to rebuild what you broke.

I know right now you can't differentiate
The ocean from the shoreline.
But darling, please believe me
The horizon does not mark the end of the sea
And the beach it washes up on does not define it.
They are still two separate entities where they stand
Despite the way the waves will continue to return to crash on the sand
No matter how many times it is pushed back away.
But darling, you have to believe
That you are not the salt of the sea.
And high tide will periodically consume
The driest sands of the shore
And it will erase all the footprints on the beach's floor
But it will always be pushed back.
Do not allow yourself to return to that
Which does not recognize your endless effort
To keep its natural state in tact.
You are as fierce as the storms out at sea
You have the strength and power of a tsunami.
Forget the shoreline, darling
Your deepest waters contain some of time's greatest mysteries,
There is still so much of you to be explored.
You have the capability to carry a ship from coast to coast
So forget the shoreline and focus on the soldier at the sternpost,
Your rough waters can turn boys into men
You are a force to be reckoned with
But steady waters never made a skillful sailor.
Give 'em hell and put an end to the myth
That calm waters will guide us home.
Forget the shoreline, darling, forget about the sand
Because there will come a day
Where you will consume every body of land
That this earth has to offer.
Only then will you begin to understand
That the horizon, the shore and the sea
Are dependant on one another for the tides and the storms
But the ebb and flow of the ocean's waves is all it needs for beauty.

I want to feel your hands around my neck
While the pressure of your fingers rides the line between
The ability to stop my breath
And the ability to quicken its pace.
I want to feel your fingertips as they trace my capillaries 
And raise the blood to the surface of my skin.
I want to feel your pores melt into mine
While your mouth grazes the arteries in my neck
And our hearts pound against one another’s chest.
I want your body heat to engulf me
While you fill my lungs with air.
I want to feel every word you whisper 
Dance from my ear to my gut to my toes
While we hide quietly under wrinkled sheets.
There’s a childlike innocence that envelopes us
Each time we shed our clothes 
And allow our limbs to become knotted.
Bumping teeth and tangled tongues,
I feel more at peace than I ever have
With your fingerprints stamped on my hipbones
And your grip tightening around my throat

My blood feels like it's begun to dissolve
And my heart's been impaled by my rib cage
I swear to god, you breathed fire down my throat
The last time our lips touched
Because my lungs are full of smoke,
And not from my Marlboro 27s
You've done more damage than my six years of smoking.
And I'm not bitter,
No,
I'm the coffee you sip before it cools
And the steam warned you it would scald your mouth
You ignored it
And now you'll be reminded by that sandpapery feeling
That it leaves on your tongue.
And you will do the same thing next week
While you sit in rush hour traffic
And your car's heat doesn't work
You try to get warm
And I will be your double espresso
That betrays your mouth again
And will make you jittery and nervous
For half your eight hour shift
And when you finally crash from your overdose of me,
While you're adjusting to a bed that's too big for you now
You'll rub the burnt patch across the roof of your mouth
And I will be that sandpapery feeling
That you can never seem to get rid of.

I’m trying to acquire a taste for black coffee
But the bitterness of it just seems to resonate
All too well with this heart in my rib cage.
And I’m learning how to sleep alone
The sheets on your side of the bed stay cold
But I have to learn how to tackle the nightmares
All on my own. You won’t always be there,
Well equipped to shoot down the demons.
I’m building up my own artillery,
I spend most of my afternoons at the shooting range.
I cannot continue to rely on an unreliable army
So I must learn to rely on myself.
This black coffee stains my teeth
I’m dropping weight again, it seems,
But my outward appearance is none of my concern
I have an entire enemy base to shoot down
While I build up a defense of my own.
Perhaps it is better to win this one alone.

I was given a simple piece of advice,
“If you want to be a writer, then write.”
I’ve been told it’s therapeutic, even
To put my feelings in black and white
Give some tangible evidence
Of everything I’d rather hide,
Spill out everything I feel, unjustified
Onto hundreds of loose leaf lines.
“If you want to be a writer, then write.”
So I bleed out this stream of consciousness
Endlessly, until all the pages are gone
But as the lines on the paper come to an end
All my thoughts continue on.
And if I go on writing this fiercely
The world won’t stop spinning
As I keep anxiously scribbling.
When do I get on with living?
“If you want to be a writer, then write.”
With me, there is no black or white
Emotions have always given me trouble
See, I’ve been every different grey on the spectrum
But never one or the other.
So if some day I’ve got nothing left,
Then leave me with my paper and pen
And I will dry up when the ink does.
I’ll never be able to grasp it,
Why I feel so ******* inadequate.
This is the only time I feel passionate.
“If you want to be a writer, then write.”
You’ve never really lived, you know,
Until you’ve loved a writer
Crawled into her busy mind
And walked around inside her
Explored the dark spots in her brain,
Entered her bloodstream
And swam through her veins
Then out through her fingertips,
To become immortalized in ink.
When you love a writer, you never really die.
“If you want to be a writer, then write.”