Life was already hard enough
Without you breathing down my neck.
You’re too close for comfort
And it makes me feel like I’m a bomb,
All wires and flashing lights.
You have hooked up explosives in my ribcage
And I’m ready to blow.

You feel like an anchor
Chained around my ankles.
You’re pulling me under.
No one told you I was hydrophobic.

When you embrace me
Your hands miss my waist and
Lock around my throat.

I can’t breathe with you standing at my door.
I didn’t want it to be this way
But you’ve forced your way in.
Like centipedes in the winter,
Like a butterfly tearing its way out of the cocoon.

You want this to be something beautiful
You want me to be more than a dream.
But I can’t let that happen.
I won’t let that happen.

I am thin wisps of smoke.
I am fog.
You can’t trap me in a jar.

Many scars ago she tied a cherry red balloon to her wrist
A free-floating, lightweight balloon.
It made her happy.
But her hand started to turn blue
Because it was strung too tightly,
So she cut it from her wrist and watched it go.
When she was thirteen,
She gripped a magazine tightly between two cherry red nails
As if it were the Bible
To the world she got ****** in to.
"Will I be beautiful?"
She asked artfully synthetic faces
Painted on a canvas of bright and glossy paper
"Yes" they would say with cherry red lips
Teeth clenched and plastered smiles
"Will I be gorgeous? Will I be wanted?"
"Will I be pretty?"
She asked her mother
With a thirsty tongue
"No" her mother said
"You will not be defined by two syllables
And one word"
"Don't you see the balloon you have tied around your own neck?
It is strung around your heart.
It seems beautiful now
But it closes tighter each day."
Even as she heard this, it was with crafted ears
Her mother searched for personality in her eyes
But they too were emblazed with the cherry red
Her blindness made her unaware of the blue
That started in her fingertips and ended in her toes

one thing I've learned
is not to settle for a false love you yearn.
You won't meet a prince,
just someone who pretends for a while,
you'll think it is all that you've dreamed of
But then that dream becomes dark
And it'll spin out of control
Your emotions will pour out
and might crumble your soul


but one thing i've learned
is not to settle for a false love you yearn

Released from my physical form
I allow the tendrils of sleep
To conduct it's shadowed symphony
Crescendoing
Into a frenzy of cacophonous arousal, exhiliration and fear
My body soars in dream land
Shallow breaths become hurried
Bottomless pit free falling
Alice in Wonderland acid swirl
This crazy train is right on schedule
Each night whisking me off
To the exotic, horrific and depraved
My only respite...
The sticky sweet haze of Mary Jane
As she melts
Into the visceral underbelly
Of my subconscious
Only then do I wake well rested
Not aching from the memory of sleep