katy perry wasn't far off track
sometimes my emotions feel like plastic bags
drifting in the african dust...
a place i put my feet
one february
years ago

and flatsound tells me to come clean
but i can't
i have nothing to contrast it with
ignorance is my final plea

and i don't even know
what holocene means,
bon iver

but i know
that poetry is just words on different lines
and they're the only ones i seem to write
these days

they have not words
to strike a competitive pose
against ours
but they do the best with what they have.

you're a walking universe
and
all your stars have gone out

now it's so unfathomably
       dark.

smoking craters as planetary masses
collide
and
you there: remote, frozen
and held together with the gravity of your own depression
light years from any sun.

i wonder if every someone
is a universe spinning in
their own sphere of energy.

i wonder if universes can ever connect.

i look at you through telescope pupils,
flecks of dust catching light.

i don't know if our universes could ever touch
or if
we're both alone in the stretching constellations of our heads.

I broke.
I broke and you saw me
And I asked you
Because I was afraid
Because I was chaotic
Because you were the only one who had ever seen
I asked you
"What if I'm not meant to be human?"
And you said
"Oh you are
You are."
You told me
You thought I was wonderful
And then you
Proved that
You didn't
And that is why
It hurt.

You are the person who held me through the worst moments of my life.
You are the person who refuses to talk to me days after.
Such power
Such cowardice
And you wonder why I am afraid of you.

the parties and the drinks
and me stumbling and sinking in the slush.

i can't remember when but i danced with a boy:
a friend of a friend whose name escaped me then.

my memory is a dark pit
and i stare down in it trying to make sense of black.

he took me back to his room
i guess.

i woke up crammed into the edge
of a twin size bed with a body next to mine.

i've never dressed so fast in my life
fastening buckles with a speed i didn't know i had.

i cried walking to my room dressed in last night's shame
shaking with dehydration and an emotion i couldn't name.

i laughed about it like it was just another
joke passed around from friend to friend.

they said he was in a dry spell
as if i was a well in some man's desert.

i was a dumb drunk ******* a dumb drunk night
and in spite of my memory painted in swatches of black

no one said stop or no or
let's get her home.

there's a four letter word that sometimes comes to me
and holds me in his *****, ugly claws.

that emotion comes again like ink spilled on a page,
i don't like to think about it, to make it real

i don't want to be touched by a stranger again
i'm afraid of men's hands now

i'm afraid of men's hands now

I bleed and I purge,
Because when I do
More leeves my body and my soul
Than just blood and *****.
The white blood cells cannot
Fight off my self hatred
Your hatred
The lies
The insecurities
The words anyone ever said
Everything I've ever heard
Ever over heard.
The bruises I get from you all might vanish
But they poison my blood.
And every meal I eat with anyone,
And with myself
It is poison.
I bleed out thousands of pounds.
I regurgitate the words I heard
As you held me down on that pool table at the party
And as you showed up drunk to my basketball game when I was 13
And as all of you stood outside my door bashing me.

But it's all a virus.
I can't get rid of all of it,
And everything multiplies.
It grows.
It fills me up
And it's why I'm so big.