Sometimes victory is the first step. The turn of a doorknob. The cry for help. Victory is finally getting up to eat dinner after crying silently on your bedroom floor when the weight of the world collects like dictionaries upon your shoulders. It is eating that bowl of ice cream anyway, even when the same voices that have haunted you for years keep attempting to shrink you into a skeleton shadow. It is dressing up in the morning when all you want to do is let scorching hot water carve paths down your spine, forgetting the sound of all the voices you have ever heard because it causes you to wonder just when yours disappeared. It is reading a poem in front of your class, hands and voice shaking like palm trees in hurricane wind. It is realizing that some people will pretend to understand the fire of your soul yet cower in your presence due to the terror of getting burned. It is realizing that you are not immune to this, susceptible to creating madness in the nights you keep searching for, but cannot find, any air left to breathe.
It is admitting you are weak. It is choosing to believe the I-love-yous even when they hang above your head like chandelier glass. It is falling asleep shattered yet committed to wake up anyway. Victory is hidden in the idea that tomorrow, as lonely as today has painted it,


exists.

what is left with the poet
after her words have been silenced?

nothing but the static hum of passing time
crawling past every wilted heartache,
every kiss left out in the summer rain
to rot inside stained pages that have forgotten
the blistering sensation of abandonment

no matter how hard she craves
for them to return home,
the door remains propped open
with a crumpled love letter
stained with sweat and addressed simply
to a name she has not heard
since the last time
she listened.

I am here to tell you a little secret. It really shouldn't be one, but perhaps that is the main problem. I hope to somehow fix it. But here it is:

You are beautiful whether you believe it or not.

Here is a dangerous lie that our society and culture endlessly romanticizes:
• Beauty is skin deep.
This is the part where I prove them wrong.

Beauty is not skin deep.

Beginning at a young age, I developed an unhealthy concept of what true beauty was. To this day, I can still recall being twelve years old and devastatingly unhappy at my physical appearance staring back at me through my own reflection in the bathroom mirror. I saw nothing but ugliness glaring at me, the glass revealing all of my visible flaws. I didn't look like the girls in the magazines that scattered my bedroom floor, faces glowing like angels on glossy paper. I wanted to. I wanted more than anything to be comfortable being myself.

There was just so much that stuck out to me, so much that needed fixing. Curves in all the right places? Forget about it, more like a stomach that hung over my jeans. My hair was so thick that it snapped every single hair tie and couldn't hold a single curl. My nose sat awkwardly on my face, always something to sigh at whenever I would catch a glimpse of myself. My eyes were too dark, too brown to be beautiful. I couldn't grasp this idea of unattainable perfection, the kind of beauty that only exists on the airbrushed models on movie posters.

And because I could not love my appearance. I could not love myself. My self-confidence plummeted at this age, causing a wave of hysteria to envelope me. Trapping me in its embrace, this flourishing hatred began to consume everything that I was, distorting the visions of the potential I carried within me.

There was nothing beautiful about it, hating every single inch of myself. I was so busy trying to fit into the mold of the most gorgeous human being, trying to wear a mask of a person who turned heads whenever they entered the room. My mind had been wrapped around this idea countless of times to the point where I could no longer find anything worth loving inside of me.

But while chasing this idea of flawlessness, it was almost as if I had forgotten about everything else. The things that composed myself during that time period, the things that were not visible to the naked eye. The magnificent things that were present in me, that made me who I was- hidden by a wall I had put up by myself simply because I felt the need to hide from the judgmental eyes of an imperfect society.

Years have passed and now I love who I am. I am no longer twelve years old, but there are still many painful insecurities that plague me, except now I am strong enough to look at them and smile.

I have so much to be thankful for. Though I do not stand 5'7 like I had wished, I feel tall when I radiate kindness to the people around me. I do not have runway legs, but they are strong enough to leap through the air and run away from everything that no longer respects me. I do not have piercing blue eyes, but mine are capable of finding art in everything around me. I may not possess an hourglass shape, but I know how to use the time I am given to impact my peers in a positive manner. I may have bad days, but that doesn't mean I have to give up every ounce of faith and hope left within me. I may be ridiculously imperfect, but I am so outrageously real- and surprisingly, that is all I ever want to be.

The skinny girls in magazines and shirtless poster guys are still beautiful, but that doesn't mean that you aren't. To my boys- You can be attractive without a six-pack or a six-foot stature. And ladies, you can be stunning without a Kim Kardashian figure. You cannot be defined by a number that reads on a scale or the way your hair looks like when you forget to brush it in the morning. You are not labeled by the color of your skin, your athletic abilities, or whether or not your thighs touch when you walk. You are beautiful because you are you. The way you speak passionately about the things that keep you breathing. The way you laugh with your friends on the bus ride home from school until your sides feel like they're going to cave in. The way your eyes light up at the desire to understand, to learn, to grow. The way your smile spreads like the flu, even the way you fall asleep at your desk when you spend four hours finishing up the homework you could have finished two weeks ago.
You are made of blemishes, scars, imperfections, and insecurities- but they are just as wonderful as your soul. They are constant reminders of how far you have come, and the journey you have yet to fulfill. This is your life, and it would be a shame to go through it without leaving a mark.
They are the flowers growing in the sidewalk cracks of your mind. Do not let them be overshadowed by the debilitating weight of the world's words.

Let them grow, Let them be free.
Let yourself be beautiful for who you are
rather than who you are not.

The day we fell in love, the world stood still for the first time.
No movement other than the midsummer air humming electric,
the warmth of our words rising up into dense clouds
and gray atmospheres of sticky potential.
I remember thinking, as our dewy skin melted into the grass,
how strange it was that the world kept turning constantly.
Cars speeding on hazy interstates, babies being born in porcelain bathtubs.
Screen doors slamming in distant houses, ivy crawling across
the windowpanes of writers who will never see their name sprawled
across musky paper spines. Houses torched, brakes cut, hair trimmed.
Somewhere, an arthritic old man sets his newspaper down. It is raining.
He dances, flood water cascading around his ankles. He only thinks of her.
City lights paint taxi exhaust bright green. It is nighttime in the city
and teenagers drive recklessly through underground tunnels,
hands raised through the sunroof of their father’s cars
as the yellow light bleeds into their corneas.
Everything is set in motion, the day’s suffocating inertia of color,
a spinning top cacophony of mindless rebirth.


It is different today. You kiss me softly, velvet-lipped and eager,
and the world stops turning. The streets of Mumbai are silent.
There are no babies screeching in the quiet rooms
of church services, no hearts in the midst of being shattered.
The old man stops dancing.
His eyes are closed, her face still sketched on the backs of his eyelids.


The sky sees nothing but us.

Even the sturdiest trees in my backyard quiver like mad in the breath of a strong breeze. I am like them, as I panic over the thought of watching you brush effortlessly past my shoulders, the way hurricane wind has the power to sweep a grown man off his feet. I am cautious, tiptoeing around the idea of your absence like fallen power lines in the rain, trembling as I carry the precious moments I have spent with you in the safety of my own coat pockets so they will never feel the agony of electrocution. I am electrified, as I seek shelter from the storm within the comforting warmth of your arms. There are places where the sun flutters her fiery eyelids against waves that kiss shorelines like familiar relatives. There are places where park benches call us by name and ones that long day and night for our feet to grace their unexplored streets. There are words that hang in the atmosphere like hot air balloons waiting to carry us to newborn horizons. It is strange, how there are places where the skies do not bleed threats or cry in languages we cannot understand. How I know that we are metal statues standing embraced in a field during a lightning storm, and yet I would rather get struck with the energy of a thousand prayers if it meant that I could stay, frozen in time, for an eternity we are not guaranteed.

After comfort settles in, you wonder if the giddy anticipation has already packed its suitcase and whether it has already considered embarking on the next flight home. Today, your hair is pulled back in a soft tousled ponytail and the two hours you spent getting ready for your first real date has since waned into a rushed ten minutes, bobby pins resting at the corner of your lips. No longer do you wait on the staircase, eyes cast through the dusty window at the curve of your street for his car. Instead, you hear the electricity of his footsteps come humming up your front step, reverberating memorized and familiar, a sound that still makes the edges of your heart rise upwards like something you mumble in your sleep. It is today you decide that this is normal. His socks on the floor, his shoes kicked off and remaining tied tightly at your front doormat. He smiles and it looks exactly like last September, like uncomfortable summer, melting like birthday candles and falling in love with a stranger all over again.
You know him now, his hands, little—but firm. Those eyes shining in the humid July, and you swear that if someone asked you to choose their color from a palette, you could find it in a heartbeat, with a nonchalant point of a finger. Yet there will always be something about him, something new and as fresh as a ripe apple falling from the highest branch, bright burning red that you catch with your bare hands before it has the chance to hit the ground.
And your love, though you have learned it by heart, is the apple, scarlet and dewy, that you keep your eyes gazing up at even after you have memorized the physics of its fall. His arms are a fire you have warmed yourself by long enough to feel safe forever. But you are both ruthless and young, burning in dangerous shades of potential eternities.

You have fallen, but you are still falling. Love has a knack for catching the hopeless.

Wrote poetry and decided to turn it into music.

Link: https://youtu.be/BadmCkoPOdE

LYRICS:

You hear me through the silence
Bleeding down the streets
That used to know your name

Can you see me through the fog
That's anchored to your eyes
Oh you can feel me sighing

Take me back to you
Take me back to then
Take me back to midnight
Dancing on the rooftops breathing blue
Like heaven's sin
Let heaven in

Your veins, sweet surrender
Summer catching rain on
Skin that's tasted freedom
Young, but why are we so
Quiet--
You are still my words
When they are left to die
Your phosphorescent smile

Can you love me
When the night holds steady
When my hands are trembling
When our hearts burn lonely

Take me back to you
Take me back to then
Take me back to morning
Dreaming in the sunrise living reds
Like heaven's sin
Let heaven in

teach me youth,

the way it fumbles down spiral staircases
and flutters in late summer wind,
how it forgets the existence of time
as if preserved in fear
like fireflies pounding tirelessly against the walls of our trembling hands on August evenings

for I have forgotten it,
the look--
eyes overcast and words crossing their arms
because they have grown too fearful
of making a mess, the shy first kisses of  tangled hair and secrecy.

teach me how to dance
with aimless feet, stumbling
as if light can only pass through
the opacity of hardened hearts
with the soft brush of innocence
that somehow neglected to paint you brand new.

i have gazed through this window
for three and a half hours now
as if the reason why you left
is hidden somewhere behind the trees
and i worry about you, endlessly-
with a painfully heavy heart
that threatens to spill out on paper

i have wondered about you
since the sun first kissed me
good morning,
but i don't want to wonder anymore
(is it even love if you have to wonder?)

with a thump of bitter confusion,
i am strangled by my own questions
from a mind only cluttered
with thoughts of one person

i'll let the sun disappear
as the moon kisses me goodnight
and tonight will not be the last night
that i'll fall asleep with your face
engraved in my memory

i'll let the stars cover me
and envelope the scars you left
from the words that escaped your lips
i'll try to forget you tonight
and maybe tomorrow
i won't have to wonder anymore

On the evening of my sixteenth birthday
I remember curling my hair with an iron and
burning the tips of my fingers pink,
mumbling pained words under my breath
that I probably shouldn’t ever repeat
unless I desire to live beneath the shadows
of adult eyebrows being raised so high
they might never come back down

as if they had never said something like that
before

that night I put on a silver dress,
and lipstick so red it almost gave the illusion
that I had been bleeding from the mouth
but I felt unstoppable, so why not?

“why not” was the question
that was always replaced with stone-cold silence
and the shrug of a shoulder
instead of an answer

that night, I blew out sixteen flaming candles
and felt beautiful,
surrounded by the smiles of friends I had met in high school
and ones I had known since the days when our only worries
revolved around who had the prettier Barbie doll
and who held hands during recess in the fourth grade
and these thoughts caused my stomach to somersault because,
now that we were illuminated by candlelight and the brightness of celebration,
everything had changed.


I blew out my candles and did not wish
for a car, or a new wardrobe, or for more
faces to call my friends, but rather,

I wished to be taken seriously.

I knew there was a deep-rooted problem
when I became acquainted with real love for the first time
And everyone said that I was too young, too incompetent to understand
What that word even meant,
That I was silly for believing that such a concept could exist
When you’re sixteen and five and a half feet tall
and not that great at chemistry or parallel parking
and can barely even hold up a strapless dress
as if somehow that dictated
that I was too small, too stupid to realize that
love was something much bigger than I am
but I did.
I do.

And there is something so contagiously twisted
That lurks in our society like a epidemic
The idea when your age lies between thirteen and eighteen
you are not really a person
that instead, you are a shadow of ignorance that sleeps all day
and clothes yourself in different shades of apathy
and that the only things you care about are
alcohol-induced parties on Friday nights and
losing morals and hours of sleep while gaining temporary highs
as if that is the highest I will ever go in life

you have to be kidding me.

because you might look at someone like me
and snarkily remark that I never look up from the screen of my phone
and you might think that my taste in music is repulsive or that
I’m only holding his hand because I love the thrill of letting it go,
and you might think that people my age have brains
that contain only a spoonful of intellect and the rest is just
empty space filled up with disease
but maybe it is time that your pedestal falls
and you realize that the older the wiser
is hardly ever true at all

I have witnessed lives spiraling out of control

the truth is not that we are dirt
and no, I am not taking pictures of myself unclothed
or chatting with strangers in online rooms
maybe the reason why I’m on my phone
is because I’m talking my best friend out of killing herself
and I’m researching time travel and why the happiest people hurt the most
and a cure for my own depression
and better words to fit my poetry
I am not equal to the garbage you see kicked to the curb of the street
Or scenery while you ride on by in your horse and carriage

I am just as great
As someone who has spent 80 years of their life achieving
And if time is uncontrollable
Then why am I being treated like somehow,
I have not chosen to be here long enough to know anything at all

And one day I dream of having my words praised for the truth that they are
Rather than having eyes roll back in guilty judgment
Because I have not lived as long as you have
And yet I am the one writing the words

Because yes, I am sixteen.
I haven’t even been here for two decades
but I do not search for happiness in empty glass bottles and clouds of smoke like you think I do
and I do not play with hearts like they’re made of matches
because I know that they burn
and when I tell him that I love him
I am not doing it to **** time
and I know that life is sacred and
impossible to retrieve once it’s gone and I am not going to waste
the precious seconds of my own aching until someone decides
that maybe, I am worth listening to.

Because I know that I am.
And on my sixteenth birthday,
as I smiled scarlet in every photograph
I was right--
I am unstoppable.

So often we hear stories about love. It is a word that slips easily off the tongue as if it is made of only the finest silk. It has become a mumbled concept that we poke fun at, the joke someone tiredly decided to crack at a birthday party because everyone has already memorized the punchline. Love, the deepest of all popular clichés, sits prominently upon pedestals within the stanzas of sappy high school poetry and in the elderly eyes of companions that have spent decades of their lives blooming in adoration. Love, the only child of fear and fearlessness, is the friend you invite to the party out of pity because your mother told you to. Yes, we are all drastically different people; from ethnicity to personality, and language to beliefs. Diversity is potent, harboring oceans of colorful ideas that define the nature of beauty itself. It keeps the human race buzzing with truth, extremely vital to the development of who we are all becoming. And just like ourselves, there exists many different kinds of love. Loving ourselves. Our families. Our friends. Our passions. Another person whose existence gives life itself infinite value. Each other. As people, we cannot be defined by labels. We cannot be packaged and wrapped into pretty little categories of where we fit solely based on the events of our pasts. We cannot only exist interpreted by where we have been and what we have seen. We are not just where we truly feel the most at home or what we choose to fill the empty space where the puzzle piece we have spent years searching for belongs. In fact, we are not just anything. You cannot define your worth by the way you sign your name, because when all is said and done, the only thing that is visible is the curvy loops in the way you penned the first letter with only ink and paper. No skin. No bone. No fight. No dream. The roads you have traveled to get to today’s destination do not matter as much as you think they should. A recovering alcoholic. The girl who survived an arduous battle with cancer. The teenage guy whose future feels impossible to decipher. A middle aged man who quit his job in order to seek true happiness. These are just fragments, broken glass pieces of who we are. Only a cropped, blurry photograph. Never the full picture. Love allows us to zoom out. Love permits us a chance to view the bigger picture, to expand our hearts in order to make sense of not only ourselves, but the chaos that has surrounded us for as long as we have been conscious enough to remember it. What does a sixteen year old girl of an uneventful town have to say about love that is so important or even worth the time of day to listen to? The answer, like ourselves, cannot be answered so simply. It sounds silly, unheard of, for a young woman of such a tender age to believe that she has the wisdom to understand the many facets of the foundations of love. However, there is so much electricity she has stored from the hands of time, the gifts of observation, and priceless experience to bleed out into words so that the people who told her she was too young to possibly understand a fraction of its meaning will realize that she did. She does. Or at least, she is beginning to. This one is for you. Perhaps you have been taught to treat love like a swear word, the estranged family member that disappeared from your household Christmas card collection. Perhaps you are trembling to experience it for yourself, rather than hearing what it must be like to hold the hand of a silhouette that does not desire only to let go. Perhaps you have spent years believing that love is only a feeling. Only positive. Only fluttery. Only romantic. It is not always such. It is a force that, much like a Category 5 hurricane, cannot be reckoned with. But “cannot” hardly ever resonates with “should not,” and so I beg you, that when the winds disturb the shutters, sometimes it is beneficial to keep the window open. Let love envelope you. Let it love you. Whether you like it or not, you are the home that will not crumble in the gentlest of breezes or the most treacherous of gusts. You are strong enough for love because that is what you are made of. Not just blood or tears or cheek-to-cheek grins. You are made of love. This package of love is the only category we should cease to be afraid of. Love, of all forms, is who we are.

This morning I was born, pink as a sunrise waiting patiently to melt into infinity.
I turned five in the afternoon, small hands tracing entire universes in the frost of a school bus window, wide eyes peeking out into a frigid February dream I have long since forgotten.
As dusk began to stretch its fragile skeleton along the walls, I was suddenly thirteen and searching for any trace of a ghost screaming relentlessly inside skin I could not recognize. Broken mirrors and madness tasted all too familiar as the sky began to blacken like something rotten kept secret for a little too long. Patience, young one. Minute hands will soon teach you how to taste sweetness all over again.
Faint stars collected far above my head, and all of a sudden I was one week away from seventeen. I knew that if I slept, she would greet me, after a day of sixteen beautiful stories waiting to be told.
A swaddled baby. A toddler scribbling backwards letters on blank pages buzzing in anticipation. An imperfect perfectionist, a paradox in process. A wanderer searching for fragments of salvation on an earth too broken for redemption. A rescued victim of her own absent self. A soul that has stretched its edges to form the revival of a buried smile. A renaissance blooming with every fleeting moment.

I have been all of these things. The thump in my chest understands this. Time paints with a hand that never tires of healing, never grows old, never loses hope.
In the morning I will rise, pink as a sunrise with blazing eyes that can already see the dance of infinity.

Write it all down. The way you feel when you wake up on a rainy Saturday morning, the howling thunder of a summer storm, how your heart races like hurricane winds at the simple thought of tomorrow. Write about your best friend's laugh at three in the morning and how blissful it is to have found a hand that squeezes yours back. Write when you feel as if your soul is perched at the very top of a mountain, and when it sinks to the deepest part of your mind's treacherous oceans. Write when your heart is dancing like a ballerina spinning in a white tutu. Write when it is still. Quiet. Lost. Write when you've fallen in love, when you've lost at a cruel game, when you fall asleep wanting to erase every memory you've ever experienced, like the songs you cried to when you were thirteen and swore you were falling apart. Write it all down, the bright colors that melt into fond afternoons, the bittersweet tastes, the textures that scar, the aches and pains. Write when words can no longer express what exists inside of you. Do it anyway. That is what love is.

one of my favorite things in the world is the way i catch you smiling after we talk. there's something so captivating about the way you smile to yourself when you think i'm not looking (but i am, i always am.) i have memorized the way your hair catches the rays of sunlight and how you hold your head up in class when you are too busy falling asleep to pay attention. i think that your eyes are windows that hold thousands of different galaxies within them and lately it has been killing me that one day i will no longer be one of them. you always saw things the way i did and i could have sworn our souls were tied together in another life. i find myself getting tired of love stories but i don't think it's possible that i could ever get tired of ours. we were never about red roses or cheesy valentine's day cards or sloppy makeout sessions in the back of the movie theatre like the other kids, but that's okay. shy "good mornings" and deep midnight conversations mean more to me than anything left in the world. you can write anything on a blank sheet of paper and call it poetry, but our story is not just a puddle of words and fractured sentences. it is not a menagerie of fancy words dressed up to look like they mean something, because our story is the epitome of beautiful. i understand that time is just the sad ticking sound of the lonely clock on the wall, but if a genie granted me three wishes, i would wish for more of it with you. forevers are always infinite and i know it's hard for a girl like me to wrap her mind around a concept like that, but all i know is that i'll never be ready to spend an infinity without you by my side.

you were not a verse
or a stanza
or a meaningless jumble
of half-hearted words
and you were not just
the crossed-out name
in the back of my book

you were the ray of light
wedged between the pain
and how the colorful feelings
that decorated my mind
could never be put into words
no matter how hard i tried

you were never smudged gray
or ink stains on skin
and you were more than the substance
that spilled itself onto paper
because to me, you meant so much more
than a collection of words,

you were the story

I am holding onto minutes
as if they consist of
a thousand red helium balloons
ready to ascend like mumbled prayers
into the atmosphere
the same desperate way I sense that
maybe,
you are ready to leave me

I have conquered time with a death grip,
dripping sourly with words
that cannot form at this altitude,
with worries that feel as if
they have both feet hanging off the edge
of a New York City skyscraper,
plummeting the way my stomach feels
every second that passes without
even a glimpse of
your fragile existence

for I am a windowpane
that will shatter because of
a gentle April breeze
or the caress
of a perfect lover, destined to break
like the fragile bones
of a skeleton that has forgotten
the knowledge of living

the last time I kissed you
I tasted blood in my mouth.

i used to battle sadness like a war in my head,
but now i have learned to cherish my misery.
i always thought being sad meant infinite hours of despair,
but i never really believed that unhappiness could spark iridescent creativity.
i once loathed my incessant loneliness,
but now i indulge in the inspiration it holds within it.
if i could alter the ache of my past, i still would not, because
i would have never experienced how truly captivating sadness is.
i never realized that sorrow can be joyous, in its own twisted way,
but i might begin scavenging for the silver lining in every desolate rain cloud.
i can’t fully erase the toil accumulated from tragic times,
but i can use this hysteria to craft something quite lovely.
i won’t ever feel complete ecstasy, perhaps not.
but i might begin to heal my brittle heart.
i used to only think of sadness as an indestructible burden,
but now i possess a growing admiration towards it.

we were butterflies
and crimson cheeks
and blooming daffodils
but forever has shattered
and now we are
catching glimpses
unsaid words
and choosing
to walk away

If he makes you feel like you are just the sum of your flesh and bones, run away. Run as fast as you can and do not dare look back. The rush of cold air will light your lungs on fire anyway, but keep running until your legs give out and you find yourself somewhere far away.  Once you leave the past behind, you are no longer a girl with stringy hair and beady eyes who fell asleep every night with her throat burning of choked-back tears and missing him. You are no longer the empty girl who counted seconds waiting for a sign to stay. You are, and always will be, greater than the sum of the stars in the sky. You are the bird's song and the rain's hum. You are every seedling sprouting in an open field, but you yourself are responsible for your new beginning. Do not let anyone tell you that you are equal to the scars that scatter your skin or the empty face staring back at you in the mirror. When you finally find yourself somewhere far, far away, I hope you also find who you really are.

i think i'll always think of him as the ocean
with his eyes made of tidal waves and
a voice like a current that could always
pull me closer

i was the weather,
a pair of glass eyes that would rain
when i could no longer find reasons
to fall in love with the sun, and
i remember the days when he would
hold me in his arms when i could no longer
find shelter inside my skin, and
how our intertwined fingers became
my newfound reason to live

and letting go always felt
like i had run out of oxygen, gasping for
a feeling i thought i would lose
because i was taught that
love always dies, that it would only be
a matter of time before i would be left
suffocating in silence alone once more

but i am able to breathe on my own now
without feeling as if my chest could collapse
and swallow me whole
because i know that even the darkest skies
hold beauty within them, and if i just look up
a little farther,
i will see the moon

I remember the first time I discovered poetry,
bolts of electric affluenza coursing through soft fingertips
and into the skinny blue lines of fascination
meaning nothing at first, yet transforming into the spillage
of emotion, the invention of color,
the budding metamorphosis of the artist’s apprehension.


I remember telling everyone about the honey-tainted metaphors
that exhaled yellow pigment through our film noir madness
of ravaged years cementing over irises
and I remember the revelation, saucer eyes and trembling hands
after discovering the faultlessness of magic
that tore at heartstrings and furrowed brows,
the mumbled prayer of stitching entire blankets of words together
to keep our souls warm even as the frigid ice of Time
burned in desperation to freeze our heartbeats.


You are a poet
but to the world, you are wasted opportunity
you only know of words that slip through tied tongues like silk
and mending excuses to make up for heartbreak
You are a poet
but they never stop reminding you to keep your feet glued
To hollow ground, shaking
To find something that tastes of reality, the human flesh
sweat of long lost longing
You have to stop living in your head
In the spaces where you breathe life into promises
You are a poet
But that has never been enough.


The poet is used to this--
the knowledge of failure always shoved under the doormat
numbers that collect under crumpled paper,
the rotten look of misunderstanding as they wonder
where the science of living went missing
When did art decide to invade your insides,
Leaving no room to calculate meaning with mathematics?


Oh, but only the poets understand
That there is no formula to meaning
No theorem to calculate suffering,
Only words that get stuck and disintegrate into whispers
only all-consuming madness, write me a storm
That rages through afflictions
Write me an ending where
We are older, in the house we dreamed of, buried
Under blankets in the forgotten fog of Decembers
Write me an ending where my voice is steady
Instead of constantly wavering past the silence of goodbyes
hellos
heartaches


Love me
And I will love you
Lose me
And I will turn you into poetry
stretch your bones into feelings,
follow the lines in your palms into futures
Where we end up together
I will hold up your eyelids
so they will never feel heavy at the sight of destruction
I will shelter your heart to keep it beating
As we watch  as the words I could never say
flutter at your fingertips like moths
with broken wings


The world does not understand love


nor the poets that create it.

Contrary to popular belief, I am not always a happy person. I am not made of summer sunshine and daffodils and constantly feeling limitless. I am not a cartoon character on the screen of a static television that can only ever showcase one emotion, laughing away humble hours and only ever blushing out of joy. There are days when my skin is the last place I want to live in, my heartbeat just like an overplayed song on the radio. There are days that I burn, when staying buried under my sheets feels infinitely more worth it than getting out at all. Days when I let my fear of failure grab me by the throat with no intention of letting go, ones I wish would end before they even have the chance to begin.
I am human. Real. I make mistakes that stretch like wildfire and burn everything comfortable to me. I am a victim of comparison, of self-inflicted hurt, of seemingly endless defeat. There were eras where I measured my importance on the size of my waist, the amount of attention received from others, by false love. I once thought that I could find acceptance in what others had to say about my existence, that I would only find joy in being fearless.
Math scares me. Finding spiders in my sink terrifies me. Public speaking tosses my stomach like ***** laundry. My fear of abandonment holds me hostage, prevents me from tasting vulnerability. I am even afraid of myself on the days it is hard to keep inhaling and exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. I am very much afraid. I am alive because of it.
Fear is captivating, not always negatively. It allows us to understand what really matters based on a collection of what we are afraid of losing.
And yes, the same life I was eager to lose back a few forevers ago has morphed into one I never want to lose. I love this. I am loved, and I am holding on tight to the carousel of reality. I will hold my breath even if I fear running out of air, because I'd rather be breathless and experienced than falsely believe that there are no more horizons left to reach.

she was a novel
with twists and turns
the kind shoved behind
library bookshelves
and under heartsick beds

she spun words
into velvet
and they seeped
right through her lips
and onto his lonely skin

and oh, how she loved him
with the passion of a sunset
and the bravery of a child
and her words craved him
even more than she did

he was the reason why
her eyes strained a torturous fog
and her words clogged her throat
and a dozen unsent letters
desperately cluttered her room
and her words weren't velvet,
they were just word
and just like her,
they were not worth loving anymore

There are so many other girls with perfect hair and skin and eyes and compared to them, I am a walking joke. I am an unfixable calamity of dark grey circles under my eyes from staying up all night because the thoughts in my brain always seem to bloom at the worst times. I am the weight of a thousand words that sit at the tip of my tongue but refuse to come out. So please don't ever tell me that I am flawless because that word is so far away from what I aim to be. At the end of the day, I want to be so incredibly flawed and real and incurably human but still beautiful because of what is inside my heart instead of what sits on my skin. I have slowly become a whirlwind disaster of running away from your toxicity. I am a hurricane of good intentions gone wrong but I can promise you that you'll never find a perfect person that could love you as imperfectly as I ever did.

it is one thing to have
a pretty face, and another
to be beautiful

i don't want to seem
like i belong somewhere else,
the cover of a magazine,
or on some prestigious runway
i don't want to be
loved for the way
my hair shines under stage lights,
the length of my eyelashes

instead, i'd like to be beautiful
for the way that i love,
the sound of my laughter,
the way i spin words
into feelings
i want to feel utterly
and completely beautiful
for the way that i am,
for the way that i will be

i don't want to be just another
flawless face,
perfect to the core
i want to be drowning in imperfections
so that people can look around them
and despite all my scars, faults,
and flaws,
still find me to be
beautiful

right before i fall asleep
i crave a hand to hold
and phone calls ending in
"i love you more"

what a beautiful thought
waking up to a
"good morning, beautiful"
or daisies on my doorstep

he creates sunsets on my cheeks
and ignites a fire in my chest
with thoughts of what could be

i crave cheesy puns
and overused jokes
and being best friends
with the boy who captivates me

but i am undeniably afraid
to let him in, because
one day-
my doorstep will be bare,
with pale cheeks
and bitter stares
and i fear tearstained cheeks
and 4 AMs awake
with thoughts of what
had been

i can't write
or think
or breathe
as well as i used to
anymore

my veins are clogged
with unspoken words
and my heart feels numb
with mismatched thoughts
that refuse to escape me

and at two in the morning
i am still wide awake
stifling, within my bitter heart,
the courage-
to put them down on paper

you swallowed my words
inhaled the fragments
and the pieces of me-
you inhaled them,
and i want to be able
to breathe on my own,
to fall asleep
without the heavy weight
of my own terrible thoughts,

but you ran away without
taking them first

when i think of you, my brain fills with white noise
like the muffled static on a TV screen, you were always something
that filled the void, that kept the emptiness occupied
but you're gone and i'm left here wringing my hands together
when the chorus of your favorite song comes on the radio, and
i cannot breathe, i cannot breathe, i cannot breathe
with all of these words draped around my neck,
with the weight of a thousand sharp memories that
still sting despite the thousands of times i've tried to demolish them

i used to dance endlessly to the beat of your heart,
but a music box can only wind so much, and now
i'm stuck listening to the same silent scream of
i want you, i want you, i want you,
i'm still addicted to every part of that familiar old voice
though i swore i was finally clean

every day that passes feels like the last page ripped out
of my favorite book, not even worth reading anymore
because i wouldn't want to waste my time reading a story
that ends without you by my side

It still terrifies me when I remember
the moment I swore I would never believe
anyone who said they loved me ever again

At the end of the day, as I lie here
with my pillow soaking wet with tear stains,
words are just meaningless fragments,
and lately I've been feeling like a malnourished plant
desperate for a drop of hope amidst a barren desert

Even though the wounds you caused on my heart
have aged into stronger scars,
I still stand with clenched teeth and a weak stomach
whenever another boy with pretty eyes tells me
I'm his everything

I miss being the bright-eyed girl
who reeked of confidence and wasn't afraid to accept affection
with open arms rather than always keeping them crossed.
I miss feeling invincible, like my heart was unbreakable,
instead of hearing the monotone thump
of what used to live in it

But most of all, what I miss the most
is waking up every day without having to wonder
if your eyes have found someone else's.
I wonder if holding her hand makes your jigsaw heart feel complete.
I was convinced that I was your missing piece,
but I haven't felt whole in the longest time.

Missing you seemed like the biggest mistake I had ever made,
but as I sit here feeling broken and utterly irreparable,
like the frail skeleton of someone I used to be,
I'm starting to think that perhaps,
My biggest mistake was giving away all the love I had stored inside of me
to someone who never even tried to love me
in the first place.

there are still words knotted in her stomach,
tangled cherry stems waiting
for shy hands to unravel them,
the pungent scent of fear dancing slowly
in a dimly lit room where you
cannot see her

but you feel her,
innocent, blameless—

a soul with runs always sneaking
down the sheerness of her tights,
the one who revolved her days
around messy diary entries crammed underneath
the mattress she grew up dreaming on

and right now,
you can feel the weight of her eyelashes
fluttering against the warmth of your cheek
the desperate wings of an injured butterfly that knows
that there still exists something called love
drifting soundly down a river of juvenile apathy

it is at this particular moment in passing time
that she decides to dedicate her youth
to the one with enough courage to hide it
in the pocket of his brown overcoat

tell her you love her
before you grow old