I’m wrapped around people that never loved me honest, trying to twist out of loose threads. I’m brittled down by misers who never had the decency to donate closure to my begging body. Kisses have become synonymous to deceit and I have decided that cigarette smoke hides less than the fog of touch. Beginnings shine red rocket comet but I’m falling fast into abysses that yield no end. What harm would it have done to just say goodbye?

I’m trying to be better you know. I’m perfecting everything, I am, I swear. It’s taking some time, but promise me you’ll come back longer if I’m better. If I don’t break, will you see something in me worth enough to stay? I’ve been carrying rulers everywhere I go, always measuring myself up against all the things you wished I could have been. I’m fumbling with chopsticks to get some of these eggs out of your basket, I will learn how to be a bit more of me without as much of you. I’m heavy in my resolve, I’ll rid these fantasies and turn them into nightmares if that’s what it takes. But I’m getting older by the minute, and these fingers aren’t long enough or strong enough or nimble enough. Eggshells are cracking as we speak. In my destitution, I convinced myself to forget, I can’t quite string together the words, I’ve been crashing neurons in an attempt to remember. The beginning of the end trembled to a close in blackout memories. But tell me, please tell me, did you promise to return if I got better, because I’m frightened it was just my delusions, hovering over my ears, ringing distortion. Let me know, oh let me know, am I perfect yet?

Is there desire in distance? Because relationships are tallying up in survival that only last if separated. Space that stretches history on the heavy toll of airports. Growing tolerances that can no longer handle the plight of closeness. It’d be easier to have remained a possibility. Bodies interlock if only to forget, if only to conflate heat with warmth. It’d be harder to admit the pains of intimacy without touch.
What does it mean to keep trying? Because fondness wrecks social etiquette, and it seems dangerous how many times you can pretend that something is happening on both sides. It’s beginning to seem a lot like you’re wrapped in barbed wire, stuck to a person hook line and sinker. But it’s strange to be wondering at all — shouldn’t there have been more signs to dissuade you? Confusion sticks when someone tells you no and then lets you in.
How do people decide to let go? Because it’s expected for actions to be taken as effects, in retroactive decorum, hoping to minimize damage and break open barriers. But hearts shatter instead when passive love overwhelms. The sharp knife kills quicker, for the dull aches only hurt after scars reaches permanence. The lack of letting go shouldn’t be so pressing.

I’m throwing ships out of the sea, bowing them down to submission; they could be free if only they would repent. What does it take for the sea to erode mistakes? Notches and stitches find their way through, dissolving me into destitution. History will make me a siren, a witch of the water, calling out only to destroy. But history forgets how a woman can hurt, cut to pieces by men who always look back twice but only kiss you once. Who will hear the desperation in my voice? Who will break through the waves and find me shivering at the precipice? I will echo through time with the hopes of discovery. I’ve been blamed for damages that I have not caused. Why else would I ravage through broken singsong? A whisper would be lost in the ocean, and I am trying my best to be heard.

They say the poet is three times removed. Once — from life. Twice — from truth. Thrice — from god. I would have to disagree. The poets are the only ones alive. We’re the only ones who can measure honesty beyond objectivity. We’re the only ones who can laugh at lovers who think they can fuck you into the divine, because we’ve stopped believing in god a long time ago. But maybe poets do not belong in this world, because I can’t tiptoe around in circles, dancing in cocktail conversations. How can you wallow in dreary questions like what did you have for dinner? How can you know anyone like that? How can you map someone’s universe like that? When we have entire galaxies in our throats and NASA says it takes 93 years to travel to Pluto? But please, don’t ask what’s the meaning of life, in the way private school boys do; pretending to smoke cigarettes because it’s a metaphor for death while they quote James Joyce’s Ulysses to you. Because your existential crises are no excuse to revere a depressed girl’s writing, for ‘I love you’ and ‘fix me’ are not synonymous. That kind of thinking drowns the anxiety-drenched, as they write your name on each pill they down, as water rushes down the faucet.

When suicide calls, it is asking you to save them, but what can you say from half a world away? When suicide writes, it is asking you to announce to the world who was to blame. Because guilt runs in the family, as we label ourselves into absolute dichotomies: bad father, good mother, bad sister, good brother. I used to believe in absolutes, but that kind of thinking will fuck you over when he tells you “you need to get rid of your feelings for me” and your heart breaks both all at once and slowly; and all you can do is black out in ink over and over saying “I’m okay, it doesn’t bother me, I’m okay.” Maybe writing won’t save you, but it will get you out of the darkest days. Maybe it’s foolish to always veer to the black or the white, but at least I have never manipulated the spectrum of grays, the way almost lovers do. Because of course, when she says she cares about you but she can’t be with you just this minute, it means she loves you, and not that she hoards you, a possessive dragon wrapping her claws around gold. But not all gold that glitters are lost boys, for sometimes accidents happen and when she is holding your hand and saying you know her better than anyone else, for a moment if only for a moment, it feels like maybe it doesn’t matter that you both have boyfriends. But let me ask, when she broke your heart, did she also crack your spine so you would always fall in her direction?

The most direct path to insanity is by thinking at all, and I have been clawing at my mind, as the same thoughts circle over and over, as I make up conversations I will never have with all the people I can never save. My fingernails have scratched away all the letters, spreading them over pen ink and keyboard keys — and the words fall, either like tears or rain I don’t know, but I am in an ocean, and in an ocean, it is easy to forget that everyone else is in a drought, that they’re looking for words that they cannot find, that they don’t know what questions to ask or how to answer in a way that reaches into the milky way inside of their bones and burst out a supernova. So they look to the poets, hoping to a come a little closer to feeling more alive than just existing, pleading to hear someone that rings a truth beyond the bullshit of the real world, and begging to know nirvana in a way that proves finally, that we are beyond shells of what-ifs and almosts, that our fragility does not negate our divinity, and that we are beings worth writing about.

My sister asked me today what I thought of Death,
I could not answer her question,
I could not understand what she was asking.

Was she asking me if I believed in Death?
Maybe I don’t.
Maybe we all hide in the ground,
Until no one is near,
Then we skirt in the forests,
Telling each other our scars and our stories.

Was she asking me if I hated Death?
Maybe I don’t.
Maybe Death sends me a postcard once in a while,
Asking me out for dinner this Friday at 9.
But I’d be too busy in my affair with Life, and I’d send him a letter apologizing.
Maybe I’d even ask the florist to send him a rose or two.

Was she asking me if I sought Death?
If I spend my waking hours peeking around the corners,
Trying to catch the man in the dark cloak, hiding in the shadows?
Playing with permanence and evanescence,
Threatening to break up with everything in this world?

Maybe she was asking me what happens when Death comes.
Maybe she was asking me if I believed in a world beyond this one,
One where judgment lies in the blurred lines of intent and action.
A world where people pay prices and reap rewards.

I think she knew my answer.
That I did not want to be anything more than I am.
That I wanted my Death to be simple and complete.
To be mortal in every sense of the word.
To be without a Soul, to be without forever.

And I think
She was disappointed when I said
That I simply did not know what I thought of Death

There’s something magical about winter, you know?
Let me tell you about December 8th of last year,
Here I am, walking out of
Tim Hortons at midnight,
(Gotta love them 24 hour ones)
And the night sky is so damn black that all the snowflakes be falling,
Touchin’ ma face and I couldn’t help but reach out and try and touch em.
That was a night.
I got another.
Not a night one, but a winter one still.
I got me and some dewy-eyed girl off on a snow day, hiding indoors from the piles of slush,
letting the fireplace heat us up as we ignore the movie on the telly and get real close.
So tell me you ain’t warmin’ up
to this weather.
But dear lord, this one day has me in a fright.
Rain during night freezin’ over.
We woke up to ice so thin you wouldn’t even of noticed.
But the car came and picked me up and we drove so slow, I think the turtle would be laughin’.
The roads were a deathtrap, cars hunched on the sides, hitting the grass.
Dear lord, I thought we about to die.
I ran inside my school and I counted all of my friends.
Twice to be sure.
Honey, you don’t know what you gonna get with this kind of winter.

Every moment,
In every second,
Never left me anything but pain and deception,
Now they look at me with pity,
For to them that’s all I am for,
Pity, I say, that life turned out this way,
Pity that your hits are tattooed under my clothes,
While my blood is spilling on yours,
Pity that I can’t sand up without being woozy,
Pity that I am used to this abuse,
Pity is a word they misuse,
Giving me sad eyes when I am the who should be,
They stand as if they are not to blame,
For the broken me that remains,
For the blackness of death that is left after the flames,
But all I have to say disagrees,
With anything, everything that they told me,
If I am not at fault then who else would rise to responsibility?
You are the ones slashing my life,
Yet calling yourselves innocent,
For you do not enter the battle with knives,
Pity then, is the name,
For the villain who dares play this game,
The one who uses ruses and bruises to make me break,
I turn to you and see you all blind,
The fault for throwing me on the stake,
Is all yours, how could it not be?
When you refuse to give and only take?
Life was the prize but I have nothing to lose,
And when they find me black and blue,
With a red threaded noose,
They’ll look at me with sad eyes,
Saying, “Curse who is to blame!
For this death was murder!
He was so young, so innocent!”
And before they leave they’ll turn to whisper,
“Oh dear, what a pity.”

Oh willow bird!
How was the migration?
It seemed so long ago, but as if not so,
That you left, left my willow tree.
Willow bird, willow bird, when will you migrate again?
Does the south call you when my willow gets cold?
Not my fault that shivers tremble through me,
It is the fall after all.
So willow bird, willow bird, where is the rest of you?
Off there still?

Is this just a visit, or are you here to stay?
Do you prefer my willow tree to the palm ones?
I heard they are oh so much warmer.
Do your feathers still flap the same?
Still soft and dear?
You left before, I remember this faded seemed dream.
How do I know this is a permanent dedication?
Flighty and up in the air you are.
Perhaps you can’t promise the whims of those escapes.
Willow bird, willow bird, did you even
ever return to me

I feel as if all
The possible dimensions
Live inside my head.

Mental attraction
Equals mental distraction.
Tell me you agree.

You are the water.
I am the salt, staying while
You evaporate.

She said, “The sea always leaves the shore.”
He said, “But the sea always returns.”

they flock to me
because they know
I am a sort of ocean
full of depth —
I am water;
they come searching for deepness
they call for me — and tell me —
drown us in your wisdom,
let us tell you all our thoughts and all our philosophies
let us freeze you over in our abstract minds,
in our high regards;

and I — the ocean — find their desires so desperate
so human, but I am not human — I am water
and I wish to just evaporate, because I do not want to drench them
in the easy pickings that is depth for me,
Rather the volumes upon volumes of my spirit yearn to be whisked away by the wind
  — they come to me, but I seek the freedom of the air
and in my bitter longing, I punish them all
(I become the ice with its soundless calls)

Absolute certainty becomes absolute uncertainty with a simple second glance.

I’ll get you out of your cocoon and you’ll get me out of mine,
and we’ll open our wings and soar as butterflies.

Let’s talk about this savagery; I am just a broken breather that makes no time for anything but you;
so save me, save me God because I hear the Rapture is for the good only, and I have been good only.

my body is a crime scene,
and your fingers are all over the evidence.

loving you is like letting a wound fester…eventually all you can do is amputate.

she lingers, she lingers, she lingered.