By "sleep"
Do you mean sleep
Or are you just looking for an excuse to go die

"I'm sorry babe I need to cut"
I get the text
Tears spring to my eyes
I understand
Needing the pain
Needing control
I need it too
It kills me though
When I know you're doing it
But I can't help
You're too far away
I need to know how far you've gone
"Show me"
I send with shaking hands
You oblige
You send me pictures
There's so much blood
So much of that warm red life
Pulsating out of you
And I can't stop it
"please stop."
My desperate plea changes nothing
You still need it
"I'm not stopping until every one of these blades is dull"
And I know you'll be true to your word
"please"
It's all I know to say
You won't listen
I wish you would
Finally
The blades won't cut you anymore
You're done
But your skin remains broken
As does my heart.

Im trying to get back into this writting thing, you see?
Because I feel like I've lost touch with a huge part of me.
When I write I sound diffrent than I do in my head,
diffrent than how I sound laying in bed,
You see? I'm trying to resurrect this part of me that's dead
(Or dying)

I miss it,
I miss thinking for myself,
(Not that I've ever thought for someone else)
but I want to get back in my skin.
Not deep enough to drown,
just deep enough to make a sound.

it has come to me that i have never truly known anyone.

speech comes through filters,
through carefully constructed creative collisions
and decisions on what words we should allow to
spill through those iron gates we call
lips.

the people i think i know the best -
the boy with crooked glasses who i can burst my heart upon
and trust him to bear the darkness with a cheery grin;
the man with a crooked bow tie who allows me to critique his jokes
as if they were works of art;
the person behind the stained computer screen i now work at
who takes in my streams of consciousness with a mind that
reads painlessly into them but will never quite understand -
are not the people that i know best.

those people are the ones typing at screens like mine;
those whom i have never spoken to and most likely never will;
those who look out at sunsets like the one i see through the library window and think,
'why can't i paint that with words?';
those who understand that words aren't a gateway to a person -
they are a rabbit-hole that hurries you down through analysis and
worry and
mistakes
into

cold hard truth.

and i realise as i sit here -
a battered blue folder and curling textbook piled next to my computer canvas,
a blue backpack deflated on the floor next to me,
freezing from lack of heating and lack of person -
that i do not know anyone better than

you.

Did you know there are more than 500,000 homeless people in America?
A quarter of them children.
Boston has one of the highest homeless populations in this country.
1 in 8 Americans live on an income that put them at risk for hunger.
Do you know how hard it is out there? Do you know how easy it is to be homeless? And how people look at them with shameful eyes?
You're 47 and you just got fired from your job cause it's overstuffed you missed rent for two months, momma isn't gonna help you! You don't have any money in your savings because you had to pay off college loans and debt.
You're 19 and you get pregnant and you want the baby, you want to have this beautiful child. But your boyfriend leaves you and your parents won't accept it.
Life doesn't give a **** what your situation is, this world doesn't give a **** how you got homeless because if you're homeless you're seen as less than. Why are you seen as less than? I bet some of those people know more than you or I or he or she do. I bet they can offer you words that would blow your mind. And because they got fired, or made a mistake that they couldn't come back from we look at them and turn our heads as we walk by them, we donate money at Christmas to show we "cared but do we really?
Yesterday at my work we threw away 16 pounds of food waste and I seriously felt some type of pain ring through my body
Because I knew that could've fed ONE homeless person for weeks or multiple homeless people for the evening.
I just wanted to take it and stuff it into one of our **** salad bowls and go dish it out to anyone I saw who needed it.
Can you imagine not being able to eat for days because you can't even afford the $1.00 honey buns in the starz markets?
And people pretend they don't hear you when you ask them to help with food.
Why do we look at these people, who just want food, who just want warmth, and need a home, as if they're someone who ruined our country.
Rather then giving them the a look of embarrassment, give them a look of kindness.