I dreamt of you,
and upon waking,
at felt as though you’d just stepped from my room.
as though your hand had only left my forehead,
and the softness of your footsteps,
the quiet of your absence,
had woken me and left me hence.
knowing that I could run out my door,
calling your name,
arms open,
and you’d not be there.
you’d never be there again.
mirage.
I fell in love with the color of your eyes,
the soft light of morning barely kissing your skin.
a gentle almost-touching of fingertips to waiting lips,
but no…
I fell in love with careless words uttered in passion,
whispers, breathtaking, on over-eager ears.
a quiet solace in unknowing, promises sworn to never be broken,
and so..
I fell in love with a stranger I’ve yet to know,
a reflection in a mirror I’ve told exactly what to show.
the steady downfall of awakening, open eyes and closing heart.
I go.
(an open poem to 14-year-old me)
dearest girl,
with your name brand jeans
and perfectly styled “average” hair,
over-plucked eyebrows,
and desperately swinging hips.
please listen to me.
i remember you.
the boy who broke your heart last week,
who made you feel
unimportant,
forgotten,
irrelevant,
small,
and young.
in six years, he will beg your forgiveness,
and you will kindly remind yourself
that you’re better now,
and he will continue on his sad road.
you will change your mind about children,
and the two you bear will be your world.
they will frustrate you,
and the journey to a professional career
will be all the harder,
but every day you will thank your womb
for their laughter,
and the sparkle in their eyes
when they come to you for goodnight kisses,
and sing you songs,
and draw pictures of you together,
which will hang on the fridge,
and on your heart.
your parents will age,
and you will wish that you’d been better.
you will wish you’d been less bitter,
and you’ll understand their concern,
their need for authority,
their attempt to control,
to save you.
you will love them,
and they will still love you,
and for now, you still have time to make up
for all the times you screamed “i hate you”
at the top of your lungs.
you will fall in love,
and you will break your own heart,
and in some ways,
you’ll heal,
but you’ve long forgotten
the other hands who touched you,
and the reasons why you ever thought they
were important anyway.
you’ve learned that your body
is more than just their playground,
and you’ve repainted a few things,
planted seeds,
and learned to love yourself.
you don’t hurt yourself anymore,
and you do your best to help people who
haven’t gotten that far yet.
you have bad days,
and you have good days,
and you have days which feel like nothing at all,
but you’re always moving forward,
even if it just means lying still.
i still have some of the things you wrote,
and i look at them sometimes,
and i see how much we’ve grown.
and i see you sneaking through windows,
to sit under the moon and write about
how sad it is, and how wrong it is,
and how nothing ever seemed to go right.
and i want you to know that it never
just magically starts being perfect.
life has a strange way of never really
doing that.
but you learn to be strong,
and you learn to be yourself,
and you learn to forgive,
and you learn to change, when needed,
and how to walk away.
and i am proud of you,
because we have come so far.
blight.
I can’t say the words I want to say
so they sit on my tongue and as they rot
and dance their dirty death dance around my
aching head
my mouth decays
and with it go the lips which kissed your eyelids
as you dreamt lightly in my bed
and with it the cheeks which blushed at
your every flattery and swelled with every
grin reflected perfectly on your face
and I just hope
I just hope
that when it’s all gone
and bare
and reeks of something putrid
that there won’t be anything left
to look into a mirror and remind me of myself
and that in apathy and bare judgement of
blinding white bone and cranial infrastructure
I can find some peace and quiet
giver.
I gave not from my heart, for she had nothing left of note.
I gave only from my body, and in my sensible head I hoped.
I built you up from grains of sand, gave light that you were better man.
in dreaming, and in passing,
in mourning, and in loss,
I gave you up for something more,
yet now our paths no longer cross.
If mystics could have told me,
Whispered doom into my ears,
I cannot promise on our love
that we would still be here.
adulthood.
I wish I’d had the kind of childhood in which
finding out Santa wasn’t real and that my parents were the tooth fairy
were the biggest lies I ever heard,
& in which happily ever after never turned into
such a disaster
but simply faded into modernity & bland happiness.
I wish I’d never read a love story,
or seen my father through a glass wall with high ceilings
on the inside & the out.
I wish I’d never had cause to wonder if you smile the same at her
as you do at me,
and I wish that I could feel like I’ve ever deserved security.
I wish I’d done something, anything to deserve
the lies you’ve fed me.
I wish I’d never felt like the world’s worst mock-up,
a draft, unfinished,
drowning in the backwash of my own empty cup.
I wish I’d never, ever, ever,
never ever
grown up.
lightyears.
much like the stars we’ve dreamt of
and so fiercely loved beneath,
I fear that you will not see my light
until I am
long
past
gone.
that by the time you find yourself
searching for me,
there will be naught left to find
but dust and useless dreaming.
divergence.
in almost perfect stillness,
your sleeping breast rises and falls,
so slightly, so secretly.
those breaths you share
only with the sheets and me.
I wonder, as you sleep so sound,
and I lie restless in our bed,
what dreams are yours?
is it me that you see,
the lights in my eyes,
the sound of my breath?
or is it the bright of the city,
the call of something bigger?
I fear I am too small,
too insubstantial to know.
and so I wonder,
and so you sleep…
The seat below me is hard, cold, unforgiving. I’ve been sitting here for, I don’t know, an hour, just staring at this screen and hoping to find some solidarity in something. Maybe I’ll find something I can relate to. Maybe I’ll stumble into some life changing piece of advice, or random stranger, who’ll shine a light on everything dark and make things seems worthwhile again. Now, the longer I sit here, staring, hoping, the more I know that the world around me is just as hard, cold, and unforgiving as the seat beneath my aching bottom. I’ve searched so long for answers to so many questions. I’ve looked high and low, here and there, even deep inside myself, as the old adages often advise. I’ve found nothing worth keeping, nothing worth holding on to. Hope fades, leaving in its wake only strangled dreams and a sense of bitterness I doubt I’ll ever outgrow. So much is gone, never to return, and most of that is me. I feel empty, hollow, remorseful to the greatest extent I think humanity can reach. No one sees. How can they not see? But then again, I suppose, how could they? Maybe I expect too much, or maybe they offer forth far too little.
In any case, I am bare. Too much I’ve given and even more I’ve watched leave. I cannot, anymore. I’m so weary of trying to define the abstract, trying to make sense of a senseless world. Maybe best to just float until I sink. Let the world be what it is, and let me be alone in it. People are confusing and I no longer have the energy for the emotions I need to deal with them.
delicate.
you love me because I am “strong”,
but what if I am not?
what if I am weak and fragile,
in need of tender hands,
and precisely comforting words?
what if I am already falling apart,
struggling to remain upright,
desperate for an ounce of stability?
what if I am destined to fail,
regardless of eager “trying” and
countless tears of exhaustion?
will you love me, still,
even as I crumble in your hands
like yesterdays past,
or will you desert me?
will you leave me in dismay,
a broken pillar of strength,
a forgotten bastion of hope long past?
I have stood alone all this time,
and I want to believe you are better than most,
but this darkness has it’s hold and I am
no better, no stronger or sturdier
than the roses of winter.
iamwhatshewrote 
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