you shrink yourself down to someone else
create an image that might only work for a couple months
i hope you and him hate each other after all this
i hope you split his heart in half
i hope his knuckles get soft and his eyeballs rot
i hope you freak out when he’s beside you
i hope i echo like a freight train
in your brain
i hope the lies that you told attempt to sing you lullabies on your sleepless nights, but only conjure up nightmares
i hope you grip them hard in your palms and make him sob.
i hope your remembrance of me strikes you guilty,
i hope the circumstances make you wither,
but then i hope you don’t have to live with yourself any longer
and i hope you change
and stop worshipping yourself.
i hope this charade ends with you,
ashamed and sunken,
realizing that your ego will always crack
leaving only you and its remnants.
i hope you want it all back
but as you can see,
it is dead and buried.
i hope your body abandons your mind
 and finds a new host.
i hope you never go back to your scheming,
i hope you change
and never revert back to who you were.


i apologize; i am only a little spiteful.

when my breath fogs up the inside of this glass jar
that you keep me confined in,
my body pulses with the familiar letdown:
that you’d leave me on the side of the highway
if further instructed, pushed.
i am but a daughter trapped in her expectations
of love never comprehended.
below the knife,
i’m being watched
so i listen,
clip my own wings,
cut off my own tongue.

and what did i become in a moment—
not an entity i ever wanted to be.
and don’t you understand
i just don’t
have it in myself anymore
to mean nothing
to those that mean everything to me.
i became someone i hate
i wait outside, on your porch,
trying to trap light through my fingers.
i wish no one had to love,
had to tiptoe around themselves,
had to transform into what they never wanted.
i wish i never desired
to be meaningful to others.
the world would be much easier.
i don’t feel understood,
i just feel empty—
like everyone else is living but
i cannot
fit the oxygen mask
around my mouth in time.
in a cruel world,
i made myself the cruelest
and how do i reconcile with that?

what else can i give,
offer up until there is just a
shadow left?
i don’t know who to be anymore
and i just need to be guided,
hand in hand.
i’m young and the world
has left me lost
and i am nothing of
what i’ve always
wanted to be.
i am nothing;
i lose that feeling until it is
back on my porch,
trying to trap light through its fingers
and i always let it in.

the blue start of the night
stares into my bones.
i’m torn at the seams;
the company i keep does not wish to keep me
and, if it does,
solely like a secret, something to be
hidden, unable to be uncovered.
if i share all of me, what will be
left to say
and who says you won’t leave, let
me disintegrate?
there’s nothing to keep;
the depths of what i love
is unreachable,
unattainable. the
lives of all bodies that traversed
into and completely out of my mind,
left behind a trace of emptiness
that i once interpreted
as love—
a beast that denies itself to those
who ache to touch it.
i’ll lay blank upon the grass,
counting the ghosts of those
who have left.
watching the footsteps of them
get lost in
the passage of time,
sand covering up the heels,
chasing away the memories
that once lived in the dents.

you left footsteps in me;
the funny thing is i’ve tried to
preserve them, in vain but,
i cannot love what is destined
to be left behind,
what is bound to be lost to time.

and when you touch someone
do you want to conquer them,
take them over, make them submit?
when you lay to sleep at night
knowing you are in your body,
do you ache to be someone else;
i wish you were someone else.
and when you choose your ego,
does it feel soft and sweet?
are you proud of yourself
when the darkness lingers slowly,
leaning over your bed frame?
when you lay still,
still as the city at night,
do you love who you’ve become?
i hate who you’ve become.

i feel wasted by hands that graced my body
that have handled me how no one else has touched me.
i live in guilt, ever pressing guilt
that i was used
in ways i did not understand
in ways that only a man can.
to feel discarded, like a body,
just a body, just a vessel,
of skin tied to skin
and when you looked within,
the dive left you weak,
you hesitated to swim.
now i’ve been wasted,
thrown upon the bed
of the truck that you once drove
that drove me off the edge.
when i contemplate too long,
i dream that i didn’t jump,
didn’t wash my body in the foamy sea spray.
i bathe in the guilt that splashes over my head,
ache for a lover that doesn’t regret me
like only a man can.

when you found me,
strung out,
vibrant, completely free,
dancing on the roadside,
did it appear to you
that i was chaotically caught up in a moment’s breath?
unsure of the next minute,
if i would trip over my own heels,
stumbling over my own inability to be still,
dancing for distraction, faking love to seem important?
when you found me,
were you stranded too?
unaware of who you were
when you took a part of me
that was never even mine
but was never supposed to be yours?
who am i after losing myself,
for a moment, an hour’s clock hand touching me,
carving the reminder into my skin?
should i be loving more wholly,
dancing all alone—how it always was,
sacrificing who i am just to satisfy who i think i am?
and maybe this does not define me—
a minute’s telling, the time in which i was most free,
a vagabond pacing back and forth
on a machine-less road,
perhaps it was solely a destination
that beckoned
and begged
and i landed straight into its arms. there is
no further cause for meaningless regret
no further reasons to burn back time to reveal
the exoskeleton of something that has always been.
for once, the freedom should not shackle me
to an idea that not even i truly believe.
when you found me,
i was someone else entirely;
and you,
you were just a moment in time,
a moving thing of matter,
clinging to anything that would hold you down.