Who am I? What am I?
It's been a while since I cried
Am I a brain on top of a body?
Just processor performing code?
Well, who wrote the code?
Who wrote it?
It's been a while since I was I
I'm not a brain, I have one
I've got hardware put there by Someone else
Who am I?
I'm a computer running software I didn’t write
I'm a soul interacting with a body, a brain
Whose health I neglect on a reg

What am I?
I'm a decaying accumulation of skin
And blood and bone and neurons
I got neurons in my heart
And that's a good place to start
The heart is the mouthpiece of the soul
My identity gets ******* in the whole
Idea of my performance
And my influence
Like if I sing a song badly, my soul takes the hit
And if I lead my partner astray, the whole of me is ****
The whole of me is ****

There's holes in me
But who put them there?
I combust in small increments
My skin flies off in perfect circles
They're fragments
My heart, it's hiding behind these explosions
Hiding behind them because it causes them
Because my mouthpiece is expressing my hate
My lack of love for myself
Hate is just a word we put on the shelf
It's like darkness and coldness
Describing something through absence
Darkness; the absence of light
Coldness; the absence of heat
If hate is the absence of love I might
Just be the one who beats me
Who defeats me
Who carries my heart, my brain, the rest of me
Tied around my neck on a string that I pull through
Like my body is in captivity

I'm privileged to honor this body that I didn’t make
I'm greatly gifted a brain to maintain
My heart, my body, my brain
They shouldn't be strangling me
They shouldn't be dragged through the dirt
They should be a part of me

I am a soul
I have a mouthpiece
My heart is my mouthpiece
My brain is my hardware
That rusts and which I expend

God help me love me
And Who I am
And Who You are

God, make it so apparent to me in my falling out
That I am a part of the three-legged stool
To Love You before all else
To Love everyone else
And to Love myself
Help me see You accurately
God help me
God help this American switch culture
I am not a machine that functions at the flip
Of a switch
I am a soul, a CVT, a cable that climbs up and down
Depending on the speed of the wheels
And decelerating is okay
And (not but) accelerating is wonderful

I do not go 60MPH because I flipped a switch
I go 70MPH because I climb
I climb
God help me climb
And to falter well
And to suffer well
Humble me in my faltering suffering

Why did I make it stop
and ruin everything
I almost had...

I don't want you to be sorry
or feel bad for me.
I want you
to need me.

                   My eyes sting
and my throat burns

when you start to acknowledge me again.


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

Feeling someone painstakingly
nudge space between you
can evoke the most
helpless feeling
there is.

It's monotonous,
and excruciating.

There are no words to reverse
what you can feel
inevitably coming.

All you can do is sit
and engulf yourself in every
second you have left with him,
pleading with your eyes
to make him take his time.

But it always ends.
And when it does,
you hate yourself
for never being

good enough.


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

It hasn't even been that long.
I'm already addicted
to the sound of your voice
to the curve of your smile
to the way your tilt your head

before you flash
that million dollar smile.


You are remarkable;

it makes me sick
to my stomach
knowing
that I thought
I liked
other people
before I met you.
Now everything
and everyone
before you
seems so
fake,
and forced.


Now, I don't give a ****
about anything in my past
for the first time in my life.
Because you are the first person
that I have ever met
to make me want to enjoy
the present.



                                                     ­                                                                 ­                              *CVT

Turkey and bread
fill our stomachs
almost as much
as laughter fills the air.

Sitting at the little kid table
for a large percentage of my life,
and seeing distant cousins in college
bring their boyfriends to dinner
seemed so far away
and intangible.

This year, that is not
something that will be
beyond me.

Butterflies are clouding my thoughts
every time I think about the dinner to come.
I'm sharing the bustling city of Chicago
and my most cherished family members,
with the man who is coddling my heart.

And for this, I am thankful.








*CVT

When I was six years old
I went trick or treating
with my mom and my neighbor Lexi.
I was a scarecrow
and she was a princess.

At age fourteen
I went trick or treating
with my best friend Mikayla
dressed up as a witches.
We were in middle school
and it was about the time
when we were starting to think
we were getting too old for this.

Age seventeen
I don't even remember what I wore.
But I went to a party
and got drunk
with twenty of my closest friends
and we all walked to McDonald's
at 3 am.

I am less than two months shy
of being nineteen years old
and I'm sitting in my college dorm
about to go to sleep.
I don't really have any friends.
I forget what fun is supposed to be like sometimes.


I miss smiling
at more than just
my boyfriend.





*CVT

I can still feel your hot breath
soaking through my detangled hair
when we embraced for the last time
and
I still have that gross popeye tshirt buried
underneath my bed, tucked away in the back
and
I can still feel my agitated cheeks
ocassionally scraping along your face
and
I can still taste the salt in my mouth
from when I knew that was going to be the last time
and
I still have our last goodbye
teetering on the tip of my tongue,
licking my way to the core.


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

We speak through closed doors
and are muffled by white walls.


Avoiding eye contact
we briskly walk to the kitchen
to grab our plates in silence
only to retreat to our sanctuary.

Muted shouting always seeps through,
but I tell my brothers to ignore it
while we stare down
at our bleak hamburger helper.

Daddy is getting louder
and I hear mom crying again,
so I turn up the volume
and we try to focus on Spongebob.

After pushing my food around my plate
through a couple episodes of this,
I tell my brothers to stay in our room
while I go figure out why it's quiet again.

Mom is talking on the phone to someone
telling them what dad was wearing,
and she keeps looking out the window.

I sneaked onto the couch and saw
dad walking down the street;
a policeman stopped him
and took him away for a few days.

Mom starts walking over to me
and tells me to go to my room,
to play with my brothers.


They were too young to remember
how bad it really was.
Only now do I, myself, realize
these were not things
I should have had to see.





*CVT

"I wish I hadn't done it."

The stale, freezing wind dries my lungs
and I feel how hollow my body is
lacking the comfort of your arms.

"The reason I want to act like things are normal,
is because I wish they were."

Your final words nip at my skin
along with the icy breeze
through my cracked window.

"I'm sorry that it had to come to this."

My breaths are shallow and abrupt
this season, and they match how I felt
when we said goodbye
for the final time.

"Live long. Happy."


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

Finally being able to kiss
someone you've been
aching over
for years,

is bliss.


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

It hasn't even been three days
since your lips touched me last.

Something about the way we speak
and they way you've embedded yourself
inside of my head
      probing through my thoughts
gives me hope.

This could be the start of something beautiful.

I never thought that I would be the girl
waiting for a boy for return from college.
It takes too much strength, and wouldn't be
worth it, I thought.

Yet I didn't think twice.
I plunged into this
without a blink.

Why wouldn't I want to wait
twenty three days
for someone I've pined after
for years?


                                                                                                                                    *CVT

Notice how miserable
you have made me

      and fix it.

I'm starting to forget
how fast my heart beat
when you ran your fingers through my hair
as I held my breath, trying not to cry.
But I know that I was shaking for days
after you left and it was all over.

I keep thinking that you're going to leave her
and everything will go back to the way it was,
but I know that isn't going to happen. Yet
something prevents me from accepting
this crucial detail.

I am terrified that I will never be happy without you.
Happiness begins to fill my body, until I think
about how ******* perfect you are. And once
I tell myself that I can't have that, everything else
is irrelevant. Then nothing will make me truly happy.
Only falsely felt, and for a slight moment
before I think of you.


                                                                                                                                    *CVT