She’s touched
By the burning fingers
Of a man
She doesn’t know.

Her hopes crushed
By the feeling that lingers
Of a night
She will always know.

Her clothes ripped
Her unheard cries,
Her body stripped
To fight she tries.

Her face is kissed
By a stranger
The man, he hissed
She’s in danger.

She is left rotten
As he walks past
Disappearing into the night
Time drags.

She thought she’d die
She believed she would
No one to hear her cry
No one understood.

With shaky fingers
And sweating chest
She wraps her skin
In clothes of strength.

She stumbled across
On to the street
She’s suffered a loss
A tragedy.

She thought she’d die
But now she wouldn’t
She didn’t cry
She knew she shouldn’t.

A girl is strong
A girl can fight
Right or wrong
A bird’s flight.

She walked home
In clothes of pride
Although scars showed
She didn’t hide.

Justice to her
Must be given
A promise to her
Must be written.

A girl is not
A piece of meat
A girl is worth
More than this feat.

A kiss from a stranger
A touch from a finger
A scream that’ll linger
For years to remember.

A girl is much more
She isn’t to blame,
Fire at the core
A burning flame.

All it takes
Is a scarring explosion
From girls sick
Of ruthless exploitation.

**She fights like a girl
She runs like a girl
She hits like a girl
She is a girl.

She's got the strength
And the power
To rule the world
And to conquer.

One time a friend came over and she showed me her poetry.
She had two notebooks.
one for positive writing
and one for negative.
The negative notebook had a gratuitous amount of writing in it compared to the positive one.
She told me that when the negative notebook gets full she was going to **** herself.
There were six pages left.
I tore the last one out and said,
"well, now it will never be full."
I still have that blank page,

I'm still stuck in day-drunk unemployment.
A millennial with eyes to a screen,
adopting a science
in a bedroom whisper for Gaza.

Now a writer of pretty words and clumsy verse,
there's no place for happiness
in forcing poetry. There are ribbons and bows
around the fenced-off trees,

there are notebooks of unfinished thought.
I'm searching the skies for a scrap of movement,
for some coded message
to **** the engine of war.

There's a wedding in the morning,
and there is somebody who still believes in love.
Rainbow confetti will kick in the sky,
a dandelion is born in the skull of old Palestine.

I'm still stuck in this new-age desperation,
a constant plea for peaceful completion.
I'm changing address
for a clean way of living,

in your sweet floral dress,
let this be the beginning.

i will give you things.

at first, i will give you honey suckles bound in the locks of auburn hair,
a gentle smile, a refreshing breeze. i will give you monuments dedicated to a single glance, and you will take all of these things with pleasure.

i will give you warm rain, and deep woods, and all the clichés we hear every day but we still love to talk about because we love them, i will give you love like them, like stars showing the dawn their shy bodies, like waves proclaiming all of these things i will give you.

i will give you all forms of love.

i will give you the best possible physical love, i will give you the most elegant touches and the most jarringly inappropriate whispers. yes, i will give you *******.

i will give you lessons in art, lessons in cooking, lessons in life. i will give you honesty, and truth, and commitment, and i will give you spellbound nights where all we do is talk about how the philosophers got it all wrong, that Plato was an idiot for saying we could only find death in love, look at us; look at this. i will give you the ability to teach me, i will give you the crescendo of my youth.

i will give you the crescendo of our relationship.
and then, one day, i will give you a little less. i will still give. i will still give you speeches about world events, i will give you the coffee i make in the morning, i will give you touches that aren't as passionate but they are touches nonetheless.
i will give you midnight runs to the store, i will give you medicine for when you are sick and i will give you the ability to nurse me as well.

i will give and i will give and i will give every day, each day & it will be a little less, until one day, i will give you nothing.

i will give you a profound silence, i will give you the absolute void. i will give you a pitch black abyss, nothing at all, and just when you reach the pit of despair, just when you think you've hit the bottom, the bottom will fall out and i will give you less than nothing.

i will give you screams instead of silence. i will give you hands peeled to the bone and bleeding because they have given and given and given and there's nothing less but less. i will give you a broken home, a broken heart, i will give you memories that will anchor to the bottom of your sea & know you will never be able to get rid of them because they are the skeleton of a ship wreck & did you know, in the Mediterranean there are still preserved shipwrecks in the murky depths of that ocean from Grecian times? i will give you these little reminders of mortality.

i will give you regret that sits on an empty shelf collecting dust particles. i will give you a taste for whiskey because it allows you to languish. i will give you the worst kind of wounds, the kind that time does not give a **** about, the kind that stars even pray over. i will give you a little less faith, i will diminish your ability to trust your instincts. i will give  you complete and utter devastation, i will give you repeated cliches on their backs: hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis. i will crack your collar bone, i will crack your skull. i will leave you as an abandoned house, worn down and empty.

i will give you everything, all of these things, and more; if i give you my hands right now.

I remember
How we used to be
A lot more
Than what we are now.
Was it my fault?
Was I too harsh?
I didn't mean what I said
I didn't mean
To hurt you.
I'm sorry
I truly am.
But if you don't
Wanna be friends anymore
Or if you
Want us to
Forget each other's existence,
Then that's okay.
I'm sorry if I tire you
With the same mistakes
Over and
Over and
Over again.
If you're done,
Then I'm done too.