do not date a girl
who writes.
she will internalize
everything,
carve poems
into your eyelashes
instead of
kissing them,

she will analyze you,
calculate age
from the rings
your coffee cup
leaves
instead of refilling it.

she will memorize
the way your
lips curl around steam,
but not that you
take it
two sugars,
no cream.

she will read your
palm instead of
holding it
against her chest.

she will not
blink
when you leave,
because she is
already
romanticizing it.

I want to softly whisper
incomplete poems
on your collar bones
that don't rhyme with anything
but your heavy breathing.

I want to bury my face
in the curves of your neck
because you smell like the winter clouds
and I've been gazing at the sky
since you left.

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.”

i don’t want to be someone who writes in pencil
and eats too slowly and walks with eyes that
are glued to the sidewalk and tops of strangers’ feet
i’ve been underwater for so long that
i’ve forgotten lungs are meant
to be filled with air; exhaling seems
more like something found
on the second star to the right, rather
than a process that is meant to be
done twenty-three thousand times a day

i feel like an old woman who
looks in the mirror and all she can see
are wrinkles and white hair and tired eyes and
the absence of who she used to be

but i am not someone who turns away
from sunsets and pretends
that darkness is all i’ve ever known;
someone who thinks
the sun will never rise again

because the sun will rise again—
the words hiding inside of me will
find their way out, because
i cannot hold my breath forever

i am not someone who writes in pencil
and erases the bits that are too
honest and too imperfect and too real
to claim as thoughts of my own

i cannot keep my lips pursed and
hands tied behind my back,
i cannot keep pretending i am
a shadow of who i used to be

my tomorrows hold suns much
brighter than ones that have risen
over horizons of my past;
i have not reached the summit yet

there is so much more me
for me to become

each day, i am new.