(Before you read this, this is only applicable to my experience, I'm not judging you if this is still your life; it's written more because it was my life and I wasn't living.)


At the time I thought it helped me socialise,
now it’s no surprise I look through anti-social eyes;
supplied with a look over the shoulder guise.
Bored of chasing a broken prize, smoke n lies
I chose to thrive, pry open these permanently closing eyes.
It was the bane of my existence,
now my resistance is high instead of me.
I better be the best pedigree of I.
Instead of the guy flying with eyes far from wide
spying those that despise trying to get inside my mind,
to find they aren't real. Addicted no longer,
uplifted, higher than leaves can carry,
now you’re green with envy while I parry
back your attacks and crack on.
I blow-back your slow trap and reflect upon your affliction
I’m best without your friction on my lungs,
now I’m cutting you with the diction from my tongue,
no grinder.  Now my mind’s up to speed,
no amphetamine, no dependency,
it certainly seems that I’m living better than I could ever dream.
I’m an evergreen standing steady for centuries.
At the time I thought it helped me socialise,
now it’s no surprise I look through anti-social eyes;
supplied with a look over the shoulder guise.

Words of the forgotten voice.
The soft spoken voice that can no longer be heard by the ears of her beloved.
Her once loud spoken voice turned into nothing but a whisper of a faded memory.
The muffle tears of this forgotten girl plays a gentle soothing lullaby in Death's ears.
As he attentively listens to her angelic cries, she begins her ****** story.
Story of pain, heartache, and suffering is slowly etched across her thinning body.
Her hieroglyphics only visible to the cold longing eyes of Death.
She waits for his daunting kiss to penetrate her broken vessel and reach her impure soul.
"Please." The last word her meek voice will ever say.
My voice. My thoughts. Belong to Death.

He sold a sweet dream.
A dream so sweet even God would have goosebumps at the mere thought of it.
A dream that the fairest in all the land would be envious.
Our dream where our love would outshine the sun across a thousand galaxies.
A dream where my first name would latch onto his last name causing the heavens to sing above us.
The blissful dream that he sold to me would've been passed down to our generations every Sunday dinner.
That dream, I lived for it. Craved for it.  
Dreaming of his stolen dream that he sold to me.
Our once tangible dream began to collapse around me.
That dream I once I lived for turned into a forgotten nightmare of his doing

The inner pounding in my chest has stopped.
My heart is broken.
regret and self pity fill me with vile sensations.
I want only to cease the pain it continues to bring me in the darkest hour of night.
When I am alone with my thoughts.
A pain that was once joy throbbing inside of me.
Now a pain that kills me slowly with each pump of blood.
My heart a tool of my very own self destruction.
I must destroy it.
Yet I continue to live with it
A daily reminder that I must not end.
A daily reminder that you're slowly killing me.
Inside and out.

I go back to the old house, down off Harper Road and across from the old bakery. The paint is green now and the shutters look as if they would like to peel off the sides of the windows and float down the street. I stand there on the curb. I say, “This is my childhood home,” and it sounds like a lie. Then, “I used to live here.” Finally, “I don’t live here anymore.” That one’s better, truer, but it still sounds like a warning.

I find a neighbor too, a little older woman with reddish hair and beautiful pearl earrings, and I ask, “Do you remember a little girl who used to live here?”

“No,” she says, “you know how it is with neighbors these days, no one ever stops to say hello.”

I resist the urge to say hello; we talk about the weather. When she asks if I was the little girl, I lie. I don’t have a particular reason for this, but the knowing glint in her eyes irritates me. I talk about a cousin, an old acquaintance I wanted to find.

“Genealogical research,” I say, “a hobby,” and I keep lying until the woman with the pearls is no longer curious, or paying attention. I do not remember what I say; there are certain kinds of lies no one is ever particularly curious about after you tell them once.

I wait a polite amount of time and then I go back to the Motel 6. The girlish, conventional corner of my mind is whispering sadly. What a shame, she says, no one here remembers you.

The rest of me is a woman, vindictive and satisfied. Good, she says, and means it. If she had her way, she would burn the house to the ground like so much tinder and be done with it. A better ending than this, she says. She’s smiling; she thinks I should have slapped the lady with the pearls right across her ugly face, there in the middle of the street. You and me, she says, we don’t get paradise, but we’re old enough to choose our own hell. You and me, baby, we get a choice.

I light a cigarette in the dingy motel bathroom. It’s the first I've had in days and as close to paradise as anything else I know. I study myself in the ancient mirror, unfortunately positioned on the wall over the porcelain toilet. I say it out loud, testing the words, watching them weave through the smoke. “A better ending,” I say, and I try very hard to mean it.

You act as if everything is okay.  You let him stroke your hair and hold you in his arms because you're lonely, and he loves you. He never stopped loving you. You think that you have it all under control because when he leans in to kiss you, something makes you stop him, and at that moment you have given yourself the chance to do the right thing. To tell him to leave, and never ask him to come back. But as soon as he's gone you're empty again. Empty like the day your first boyfriend went to see his ex-girlfriend for a talk, even though he told you he hated her guts. Empty like the first time he called you a ***** and made you cry.  Empty like the day you had to call him and tell him that your baby is gone, the baby he didn't know about. Empty like the night you took one or three or five too many Ambien after he hung up on you when you needed him the most. You hate this emptiness. It stands for everything that's every gone wrong in your life, and so the next time you see him, you kiss him like he doesn't remind you of your first boyfriend, even though he does.  You watch him smile, you see the hope in his eyes, and feel part of yourself dying on the inside, because you know that it won't end well. That this time, you'll be the heart breaker, not the heart broken.

Months later you remind yourself that he was there when you thought you were pregnant, again.  With your ex-boyfriend who you still loved's baby no less. You remind yourself how he was ready to step up, and how you never could feel the same way about him. So you try to make yourself believe that you deserve what he's doing.  You let him tell you that you broke his heart, let him spread vicious lies about you, and then tell him not to apologize on the rare occasions that he tries too.  You tell him that he's right, that it is your fault. That you just want him to be happy.  When you find someone new you fall in love, and think everything is going to be okay. Think that you've finally stopped chasing after lost puppy dogs and found a boy who doesn't need fixing. Yet for some reason you still cry at night. You still want to hold on to the people you've lost and the people who hurt you.  You still feel the sting of pain when July passes and you should be in the hospital with your newborn, but you're not.  So you write poems and try to use words to make sense out of life, but nothing ever seems to be enough, and when you hold your youth minister's four month old, so tiny and helpless, you can't help but burst into tears. All you can hear is the baby's mother saying over and over again how big the baby looks in your arms. All you can feel is the maternal instinct to clutch the child closer to you and feel it's heart beat. You try to tread water, but it feels like your drowning, and the emptiness you've been running from comes flying back. Whispering in your ear that it never left in the first place.

Looking back, we never saw this coming.

Our roller blades had a relationship
with the warm summer ground on Friday
nights when our parents would gather
over margaritas and wine; an escape hatch from
the 9 to 5 work week. We killed fireflies the
way we chew on hearts of the ones we love,
rubbing their luminescent bulbs on
the toes of our shoes so that our steps
might light up the night for just a little
bit longer and maybe, just maybe,
we could hold off on growing up.

Looking back, we all  wish we could have stayed.

But bare foot soccer on concrete turned into
binge drinking, and alcohol poisoning
and neighborhood gatherings stopped being
kind.  We swapped Air Heads and Pokemon
cards for flavored condoms and a drivers
license, only to find that everything
we threw away was worth so much more
than the high school bullies, and boys with roofies,
and the girls with tears running down into
their tissue stuffed chests.  We gave
up our golden years, and to make up for it
we stuff Prozac down our throats with a
desperate belief that childhood happiness
can be found in an orange pharmacy bottle.
Hoping, I think, that someone will come along
and tell us we've done everything right,
and would we, for our reward, like our innocence returned.

Looking back, I guess we just couldn't comprehend.

We never knew that every day the pages turned
and we were slowly losing our love of fun dip
and cheap private-school valentines.  We were
starting to forget the pride that came with
the title of King in foursquare,  or the way
it felt to let go and jump from the highest point
of the swing.   Instead we staked out cafeteria
seats and tried to figure out why having
blonde highlights, or contacts instead of glasses
suddenly made you better than everyone else.

Looking back, it all seems so sweet.
Then again, they say hindsight is 20/20.

Yesterday I sat on your porch,
and drew pink chalk hearts around
your doormat.  You asked me if I
wanted sweet tea and I said yes,
though all I really wanted was your
lips against my ear.  Whispering how
much you missed the smell of
my perfume on your pillow.

And sometimes I take snapshot of my
face when I cry. I mail them to you
in a grey envelope and on the back of every
one I write down confessions about
what animals I'd run over in the
road that day, and how they all made
the same loud thump under my wheels,
no matter how hard I pushed on the gas
pedal, or how much I turned up the stereo.

Occasionally you bring the pictures
back to me, telling me everything you
know about radio waves, road ****, and how
they relate to the tread on my tires.  You tell
me things I won't ever need to know, but
will never be able to forget no matter
how many times I try to burn the memories
of you from my frontal lobe.

I guess that's another reason why I love you.
Because no one's ever told me how
they make the colors in my favorite
fourth of July fireworks.

That itch in your arm.
That twitch in your hand.
This time I,
Must take a stand.

I will not be controlled by a small blade.
I will not be pushed around by hollowed out shame.
**** that stained steel.
That malicious little fiend.
All he wants is the blood,
But release is what I need.

How comforting it is,
To feel the pain go.
To watch all my worries spill out.
The memories of this,
Etched on my vessel,
I just couldn't live without.

They start to fade,
I feel the need.
To make a brand new friend.
For weeks it will heal,
Months it will fade,
And then the whole process again.

To die by the hands of your lover.
It's a bittersweet concept that few rarely experience.
To not breathe the same air he breathes in this brief time in space.
To not feel his presence as our bonded red string falls to the pits of hell.
His dark eyes being the last glimmer of hope i see in this world.
The intimate moments where we explore each others crevices and discover a hidden world inside our bodies.
By the time this ends, my memory will fade into a dream as I die for you and you live for me.
I'll hold onto our secret until we meet in the place where our dreams can finally come true.