So We Meet Again

i saw your face in a tree stump–
large and pale, with exaggerated
sorrow sliding off the
corners of your canoe eyes.
and again on the body of
a girl with your strawberry hair.
i am strengthening myself
in nightmares so that reality
won’t seem so bad.

I Am (Nothing Without) Poetry

I am nothing
besides a collection of poems waiting
to be experienced, waiting
to be written.
I am an urn of emotions, a vessel for verse,
an undulating piece waiting to be
completed.

Losing you is something I was born to do.

it doesn’t make it hurt any less, but i know it had to be this way.

You’re Where They Were All Born

If all my other loves were the twinkling city skylines
of my heart, then you,
my dear, are the capital.

If everything I’ve ever felt before
burned with the intensity of a star,
you, my love, are
a nebula.

I Don’t Miss Your Hands

The sky was so
incredibly clear tonight.
It was one of those nights where you would have whispered:
the stars look so close you can touch them.

Tonight, for the first time
I don’t miss seeing your hands reach up to the sky.

It’s hard to settle for bits and pieces of someone you used to swallow whole.

how am i supposed to be okay with small talk when you used to live inside me?

Armageddon

I was born amid chaos.
The first words to leave her lips
when I entered this world
were electric bolts of lightning;
his were thunder.
The pounding of
his fists shook my tiny universe.

I was raised amid the crumbling
walls of a marriage gone sour,
where conversations consisted of heaving chairs,
house-wide rampages, and
chillingly silent dinners.

I learned amid the uproar that
we are not safe from the monsters in our minds:
they escape through the darkness in our eyes
and the fire in our mouths.
They fuel the momentum behind the punch
and fill the cracks in our hearts.

I discovered amid the rubble that
love means fuck you and fuck off and shut up and you bitch.
That anger is holes in the wall,
bruises and scratches, and the crack in your voice.

I watched in the corner amid
the chaos I was born into, and
the Universe watched me recoil from
the destructive violence of sentiment.

I lived my life amid the thwarted truth
that the doors to the storm cellar must always remain shut
to protect others from the tornadoes inside.
And if God forbid
at some point my body could no longer hold the weight of so many
unsaid words,
and I collapse in a heap by your side, bleeding love and anger,
I must apologize; I must mop up my mess
in order to keep you clean.

But I am so fucking sick of
keeping you clean by
mopping up my messes, when
I am covered in your blood.

So I will get up and walk away.
I will speak chaos and tornadoes and destruction.
And I will not ask for your permission,
and I will not apologize

Paralyzed

I could see the words
in her eyes
long before she wrote them–
long before she read them
on that stage.

I could feel her pain in the way
her spine curled into me at night–
long before the melancholy weighed
upon her lips (her cherry smile).

I knew she was breaking long
before she shattered, but
all I could do
was watch.

Words can be vague enough to mean nothing to someone, but mean everything to another.

the beauty of poetry is how it is interpreted