ive been told
many great poets relied
on mind altering drugs
opiates and pills
in order to force their hand
to the paper
in order to jumpstart their brain
like a side of the road
two degrees
junkyard car

i have nothing to write about
when I abstain from your name
and calling you my ******
gives you the power to roll my eyes
back into my head
with pleasure
it gives you the power to **** me
typical bathroom scene
slumped over your
"i miss you"
choking on the apologies
i couldn't spit out
in the middle of winter

ill never be a great
and self destructive artist
not because i light your memories up under a spoon
not because I let you infect me
not because I roll you up and set you on fire
and breathe in your sentences

ill never be a great
self destructive artist
because there's no jumpstart
or moment
of connection
ive tried
every drug i can find
and im still
sitting with the shower running
letting it burn me
begging to feel something

because really
what's the difference
between numbing me
and telling me
you don't love me anymore

there was a time
where i would've tied rope around each star
and handpicked every comet
and gift-wrapped them
if you asked me to

where i woke up in a hospital bed
with your apology still laced in my IV
begging for contact
like i was addicted
to the way every goodnight
sounded like a suicide note

i remember the first time
you told me you wanted to kiss me
like you were sharing a secret
with a part of me i can't get to anymore

the moment it exited your lips
and echoed inside of my ribcage
i could feel you reach for it through my lungs
sacrificing me to the burden you carried

there was a time
where i would have jumped off of trains
and written you poetry
about how everything you do is lethal

and my death wish is no longer imminent
and i could tell you that you were the sun and I was Icarus
and i got too close and everything i remember went up in flames
and my arm hurts from trying to capture the stars
and trying to leave the world in darkness
that i didn't care if the plants would die and the oceans would still
if it meant you told me you missed me

but ive attached new memories
to the ones you burned for me
ive made up moments for the time ive lost

and i don't listen to your favorite songs every day
like you're trying to tell me something you couldn't reach through me and take back
because you weren't
you never were

and if i could go back in time
id tell the girl stacking ladders to the sky
rearranging your name in constellations
that you're not even worth
a nightlight

You don't have to remind me to listen to three AM school-night words that come out in the soft whispers you've been waiting to share with me in an attempt to shield it from the rest of the world
I'll remember the things you didn't say like engraved textbook lessons
when my skin starts to dampen and stick to my body like a raincoat
my head hits the wood desk so loud everyone stops pretending to pay attention
and i have to write
"he doesn't love me anymore" one hundred times on the chalkboard
and bang the parts of my past i wake up forgetting together
watching the chalk dust from the day my mother told me; they almost lost you fall to the floor
Every negative hallway interaction bubbles over in an abandonment issue chemical reaction
and I had to drop chemistry because I found none of the connections and formulas could fix the imbalance I carry around with me like i shouldn't be failing Psychology 101.
Maybe I'm clueless because I can't tell you why weather changes or square roots of negatives
But I can recite the lisence plate of the car my dad has never visited me in
and my sisters contact information for the 4 minute and 57 second call i can pay $6.43 to make to sit on the floor and learn about juvenile detention while history notes offer me cold faux-sympathy
Maybe I'm clueless because id rather memorize the way your hand moves down my back than the quadratic formula
and give up on poetry mid sentence
and change "moves" to "moved" because it's all in past-tense and the difference between present and present perfect and banging erasers and not sleeping and
forgetting how to function off of autopilot mode
and
there are lessons I will remember that won't come from staring at a projector screen
when to stop talking
how to look like you weren't just sobbing in the bathroom
the unwritten "give a stranger a ****** if they ask" rule
I'll remember every word you tell me like the test is next period and I'll study every syllable and drown in iambic pentameter
and I'll still fail

my whole life, i have ascribed my identity to feelings
rather than concrete items and ideas.
i have been made up on abstract whim-thoughts
this presents, as you may believe, unstable ground
i would like, more than anything else, to have an idea as to the person i am.
i pick people apart like a vulture and steal their personality traits
to badly pass them off as my own.
i have no confidence that the person i am in this moment
typing this anything-but poem,
will be the person i am next year, when i forget about writing down my words and letting the world in on my secrets.
i have assigned my many fleeting names to colors, videos, a collection of short stories
but never a permanent solution
and now, i sit at a crossroad
and beg to be hit by a passing vehicle
i am a student who tries, i am an artist and a writer, i am a best friend, a girlfriend, a human being who is present in every day life.
i am not the color yellow, or the myth of the angel, i am a small girl with very tired eyes and even more tired ideas
its typical to lose sight of who you are
but i have never once had a clue as to who this soul is
i have spent most of my life pretending to be other things
feeling "real" is just as foreign as any other emotion
when theres no "real" to fall back on.
i, unfortunately, am trapped in a mind of someone who has woken from a long nap
i wander disillusioned, answering to the description of hopelessness like a nickname.
this adapted persona,
if it is, indeed, a persona,
is different in a dissociated sense.
my fear and inability to take action and base my personality off of someone else
gives me implications that,
halfway through high school,
i may finally be on a path to understanding who it is i am.
i was told that you start developing a concrete personality
at the age when you're old enough to understand words and make coherent sentences.
who would have guessed that,
at sixteen,
i am just opening my eyes and understanding words i would have previously thought so common?
if this person is who i am stuck with,
and it has taken me so long to figure it out
based on a time slowing personality disorder
i will continue to learn that i am not made up of feelings and thoughts
but up of the art of continually creating myself
and isn't a life of not knowing,
of guessing,
of trial-and-error and discovering unheard of mysteries
better than a dinner-plate life planned out in front of you?
i guess i will never know
or, maybe i will.

its taken me too long to unstitch my hands and free every thought you shuffled and stuck inside of my head

one. i think you lost me somewhere between wanting to cross miles to get to me and forgetting i exist because at some moments it feels like you worked overtime to fix the abandon architectural artwork inside of me like i was community service

two. after you came and knocked down trees and shifted the tides, every ounce of clarity was able to mirror
your whimsical efforts of drowning me out with pretty girl phrases and only calling me when you were too high to choke out my name

three. i had something inside of me that was kept under glass and i let you behind closed doors and watched you destroy it
i let you build me up with toy blocks just how you wanted me, and i let you lose interest when you decided it was more fun to knock me down and listen to the noise i made when i hit the concrete

four. the Worlds Most Fragile museum was being catered to in the holes in my chest and if i was an armoire and you opened me up your name in red pen ink would spill out of me over thousands of artifacts and priceless memories that you've bubbled over and consumed

five. even as i write this, you'd think i would find a home in an elementary classroom by the way i can barely remember how to speak
and ive got no doubt that you went out with your usual bang
and when you left you took a goodbye that never quite delivered and all of my words with you

six. my grandmother told me insects sing, for months, the same song in hopes that they will attract a mate with their repetitive soliloquies and maybe that's my hope when i tell you i love you even when you hurt me, hope that maybe one day you will pick up the phone and echo my ache with a clear, sober melody that sounds like home.

im sure the insects will find someone who enjoys their neurotic patterns and im sure i will sleep alone in an uncomfortable bed only shushing the silence as the mailcart comes by my front lawn and pauses for a second as if it empathizes with the way i stand at the door.

seven. im always waiting for a manilla package addressed to me
containing every night i spent trying to be anxiously clever and overlooking your bad judgement and the flickers across your sentences where you were forcing yourself to care

eight. every night all i receive is the crickets and a reminder that the letters that spell out your name had become my own personal hamartia before i started whispering it in my sleep

nine. ever since we met you've infected my veins like you were a deadly back alley drug and there's something so addicting about wanting to fix someone and figure them out and work for their love

ten.  if you steal my expressions and bury them in your ground and stick a wooden stake through my last words in order to make sure i only resurface when your sobriety is fully compromised, i will, as writers do, create myself a new dictionary

the act of your name will become a verb: forcing time to scrub the inside of every part of me you touched like im a sold off garage sale item and you're trying to expurgate any emotional damage that might have been done to lower my price

the way the bugs echo will become an adjective for when i am too tired to go out and pretend that my feet arent sinking into the floor

the drilled-for-oil glass museum in my heart will become a noun;  the eighth wonder of the world, and i will continue to let people destroy it and piece it back together for the sake of art

the way you left me and the ferocity of how you stole every part of me i showed you will join adverbs and Aristotle's tragedy principles among people who created their own cloudbursts.

the way i wrap everything i've wanted to say to the back of your head as you walk away into a bulletpoint essay will become my new definition for poetry and i will build myself up from the ashes i will create from your destruction, i will sing my own songs and showcase my own museums and mail my own letters and i will **continue.

ive spent my life indebted to people
like my presence costs $2.50 an hour
and the global minimum wage isn't high enough
to sit down and listen to me mumble about how sad it is that people at grocery stores artificially dye flowers to make them bluer than your eyes as if the world is a losing competition against your hands around my neck
i have not spent all my life afraid
its worse than nostalgia
and not as present as deja vu
but i used to dive off of cliffs
and fall in ignorance
but ive known since i was young
everything costs something
$2.50 an hour
a lifetime
a century
whichever comes first
i was told to be afraid
because no one wants to stick around a raincloud with no umbrella
and every word i say is fragranced with an apology
i lost the person i used to be
there was no funeral or mourning
i can't even bring myself to thank the people who dont mind getting their clothes soaked

I'd like to be your space between starting a new sentence and picking the words up from behind dusty knocked over shelves

I'd like to be abstract in the way that you can cut me apart precisely and place me in misunderstood misplaced directions and give me the power to be able to yell at the top of my lungs and call myself art

I'd like to be a thousand miles right of where I am standing because home is the breath where you gather yourself up and home is when you have to stop dancing because your laughing interferes with your drinking and home is this song over and over and over

I'd like to kiss you a thousand miles right of where I am standing but what I am boxing up and categorizing as pain is not unique

it is just pain

I'd like to erase you from me and reach inside my head to free my brain from your rose thorn words like what I need to hear is the only airsource wonder of your distorted reality

I can't tell if I want nothing to do with you or I want everything at once because love is this song and that space and the way I stop from laughing and drinking and dancing love is this homemade pain and love is this art love is every mile

love is all of these indistinguishable thoughts my pain is not profound but I will yell whether the people who have cut me apart view
me as art or not