I’ve been here before

I know how it goes

This is the only way

I know how to be

There are no words left

and nothing is growing

Legacy

You must believe it is your destiny to create beauty in this world. To shape your life with love and purpose, touch it ever so briefly with your weary hands and leave it a little more cherished than it was.

Losing

You are losing control

You are losing yourself

That man is your downfall

your ticket to hell

But his hands are like black magic

This isn’t love but God

it’s almost as good

Like some hell-bent force

that has kept you away

from everything you want

Swinging like a lead ball

all the way back

and it’s too much

The secret is

no one gets what they want

without losing who they are

The One After

You’ve lived your whole life with me, haven’t you, my love? Yet I don’t think you’ve truly seen me once. I am a projection of the girl who hurt you, a conduit of the pain she caused. After all this time, I am still being punished simply for being the one who came after.

Like It Was

You’ve waited so long

for someone you can laugh with

even when you’re sad

Someone you can be at

peace with, even with

a stomach full of butterflies

And as you are searching

the great sea of darkness

for a flicker of light

there is someone who is

searching for you

One day you will find refuge

in another, and they will learn

to know your heart

like it was their own

My Poetry

They accuse me of never putting myself on a page, that I distance myself from my poetry like an old lover I have lived to regret. They say I’m dishonest, inauthentic, that I don’t know heartbreak the way I write it. But there are other ways to tell my secrets, and I have many. Like apple seeds buried deep in my bones. Cinnamon and cyanide. Blood pacts and promises. There are so many versions of me splashed onto a page, like a carnival of mirrors. I wanted you to know my poetry, but I never meant for you to know me.

God

I couldn’t put a word to the thing I was searching for

that divine earth-shattering crash with divinity, anything

I pleaded, to knock me off my ill-fated path to self-destruction

on my way to meet with my desire—stop me in my tracks

At first, I thought it was duty, and I wore my hands

down to the bone working for scraps—I was grateful

Next I thought it was creation, the building of worlds

and I raised the dead for my stories, told all there was to tell

Then one day, I believed with every ounce of my being

that it was a man and I was out of my mind for him

yet my body wouldn’t let go in my ascension to heaven