Footprints

—

If there is one thing I have learned in this short life—
it is that those strange creatures who call themselves writers
were not made for this world—
we were made to be time capsules.

So come to me calmly—
with your shoes untied and your secrets shoved into your back pockets.
Do not spit them out into empty wrappers, to be stepped on by strangers
and die on street corners—
If you are going to leave them on the street, leave them like pennies,
placed in-between the cracks in-between the pavement,
for children to pick up and shove in their front pockets—
so they can feel like kings.

Leave them for me—
Because I’ve been spending my afternoons standing on rooftops
so the clouds can have a shoulder to cry on.
Because when it rains here, it fucking pours.
Pour yourself into me.
Trust me.
I can take it.

Crawl in like a spider.
Crawl in through the cracks in the broken windows to my soul.
Step in like you are stepping into a summer storm—
I can wash away everything you’ve ever been afraid of.
Cast your fears in like lures,
Cast them in through my pores—
And skip your promises like stones across the surfaces of my bones,
And let them sink
until I can feel them on the floors of my feet,
telling me where to go.

I’m not peeking I promise you.
I’ swear I’ll never make it to ten if you don’t want me to.

Because we’ve all been trying on people
like mismatched shoes given to us by strangers,
until we are all someone else’s hand-me-downs.
And yet we are consistently surprised
when no one fits just right.

And we’ve been searching for things in food we’ve never tasted
and movies we’ve never seen,
until our tongues are burnt, our stomachs are bloated and our eyes are bleeding,
but we’re still searching.
Because we all just want to be a part of something important.

So I will shout until you know what I mean.
Because I was not put here to put this gently.
I was put here to speak until I am drained completely—
Because this life has rubbed me raw,
and it has proven,
that it will try and take everything from you,
but it will never take my voice.

So I will spill my slurred words like black ink all over this floor
until my face is as white as the pages that I write on.

So grind your glacier teeth across my skin,
and wind me up again and again,
and do not stop until I say when,
Because this is the one I wrote when you were sleeping—
Your chest rising and falling to the tumbling tides of your dreams,
our hair and arms entwined like the twisted branches of trees.
So tired,
from always trying to reach for something outside of themselves.

Wake up and be wild with me.
Run with me—
Run like the sun is placing its hands on your shoulders and pushing you forward.
Pound your pale soles against this earth until they can read our poems in our footprints—
Until we can feel our lungs pressing against our hearts,
and our hearts pounding hard against our ribcage,
just to remind us that we are alive.

But I say to me heart, be still soldier—
Because my heart’s been beating, like the hearts of bare chested boys,
holding hands with barely dressed girls—
beating so hard it’s been sending splinters spiraling into my bloodstream.
Because my ribs were bent out of ragged wood
not made to cage such a restless thing.

But we were not made to be still, he says.
So punch your fists into the sky, he says.
Punch like you are punching holes into the clouds
and shake them until our knuckles are white as stars, he says.
We can re-arrange the constellations, he says.
We can lead ourselves home.

Dive 

—

So maybe then I do.
Maybe then, I do think too much and maybe then, I do feel too much
But if I didn’t think and I didn’t feel
then how could I have ever found the words to describe the way your body hit mine like a hurricane.

How, then, could I have ever been able to say
That this abundance of snow if just the sky’s only way
of dropping pieces of crumbling clouds down on our too-warm skulls so we can feel them.
That our skin is just our thuman version of bark only stretched too thin.
That our tired breath in the morning is just the taste
of the time that has passed pressing and clinging to our teeth.
Or, how each time I press my face against cold walls of glass
I am reminded of how often we are protected by such thin and fragile things.

We used to believe that the human body couldn’t free-dive further than 500 ft.
Now keep this in mind when I tell you that a friend of mine once told me that she believes
that God only gives us as much hardship as we can handle.
But last week I learned that a man in Austria dove past 702 feet in a single breath.
That is over 70 stories in a matter of minutes.
With lungs that shrank to the size of oranges.
Now let that sink in.

Now I don’t have much to say about free-diving or god,
except that if such a thing were to exist then I believe that he underestimated us.
Because, I believe that we are capable of things that we don’t even fully understand.
But of course, on the other hand
If you want to free-dive, you have to first jump in.

This year, make yourself a resolution to test the boundaries of your skin
Build yourself up with words, until you’re sweating out the ink.
Do not allow the blood around your bones to stagnate,

like dirty water around dishes in the sink
Never let your passions become things that become extinct.
Fill your own glass, fill it too-full, and take a fucking drink.
Allow yourself to feel it.
Then, force yourself to think.

This year,
Keep trying twist your body into a thunderstorm

You will be fast and loud but never forgotten.
Be like the sky, and scatter yourself like the stars.
Until you can feel galaxies forming around your fingertips.
Until your lungs are coughing out comets with the force of your breath,
And this planet is trembling from the force of your steps.

This year,
Rip  open your rib cage, like cabinet doors,
And be like the quick, red, thing that lives in your chest.
Our heartbeats are the echoes that demand to be heard.

Mangoes

—

I am not the person you think I am.
And I sure as hell am not the person you would like me to be.
I did not show up here tonight to tell you what you want to hear
But you are going to want to listen anyways.

I am not the girl who can spin silver stories
of romantic adventures of mystery and woe with plot twists about tangled lovers
who find a way to twist themselves into her tangled life for some sort of a happy ending.

There are no happy endings here.
There is no wedding day or record deal or over-dramatic kiss.
There are no lottery tickets or last-minute win
And everyone is angry because the camera does not spin
around the kid who just found out Santa Clause does not exist.
And no one saves the family business.

The soup of the day is not self-enlightenment.
And the specials consist of stubbed toes, forgetting your best friends’ birthdays,
and breaking everything you’ve ever been fond of.

I am the girl who gets drunk on year old tequila,
because it was all we had left and I told you too much and I still don’t remember any of it.
I’m the girl who’s telling too much again.
Who wants to be in love but will never admit it.

Who wants to build houses in the woods and smoke cigarettes,
with strangers at 4 am
so we can talk about why you can never see the stars when you need them.

Who wants to drink the rain,
so that the stagnant water will be flushed from me,
and maybe, just maybe,
I can feel fresh and new again.

Who wants to travel,
to taste the sky, until this planet becomes my backyard
Who will write her words on leaves,
and make her bed in-the-space-between
the unanswerable questions of six year-olds.
And the uncertain, half-assed,
answers they are given.

I am the girl who wants to become tattooed with the invisible ink of experiences.

And pluck the daisies from her hair
so she can ask the petals where they learned about love.
Who wants to be able to look over her shoulder and be proud of the places she has left her footprints.
I’m the girl who wants too much again.

I want to ask you about the last person you loved.
I want to know if you’ve been spending the last 4 months
trying to scratch their name into the clouds so they can carry it away for you.
Because I am the girl who has been scratching so long my fingertips are bleeding.
Whose hands have been broken so many times trying to point their way home in so many directions
my fingers look like corkscrews.

Who hates to admit that she still buys your shampoo
so maybe, just maybe,
someone someday can love me as much as I loved you.
Who can’t stand that still knows that your favorite color will always be stuck somewhere
in-between turquoise and blue.

I am the girl who showed up here tonight smelling like masochism and mangoes,
who’s got nothing left to lose but the scent of you.

Who spent last winter falling in love with the cold
because she loves the way the snow hides her shadows.
Shadows are the worst liars;
She knows that she is no one worth following.

Who understands why those clouds can never stay in one place for too long.
Who realized, that we spend the first half of our lives being lied to and the second half believing them.
Who can play hopscotch on all the hearts she’s ever broken from all the lies she’s ever told.

I am the girl who showed up here tonight to admit to strangers, that I do not believe in god, but I used to believe in you.

Echoes

—

 

As it turns out, I have more fingers on my hands than dollars in my pockets.
And I keep losing all of my priorities in all of the wrong places.
Tear me down so you can rebuild me with words—
I want to know about everything you’ve ever done
So I can be a vault of secrets and things that should have never been said. 
So break into me and break me in —
I’ve been told I’m too young to have a spine that screams this often.
Last September I spent four weeks filling the spaces in between my lungs with smoke until I was coughing out my heartbeat—
I’ve been told I still exhale the echoes each time I hold my breath

Cracks

—

It’s almost the end of October,
and your lips are as red as leaves on the sidewalk. 

Fall was always my favorite season.
I spent most of last September falling in love 
with the way the sunlight hits your teeth 
when you talk.

They say laughter is the best medicine.
And I haven’t felt this good since the day I crashed my head into the wall

and saw the moon light leak out of the cracks in my skull.

If we were not made of stardust 
How else do you explain the way we orbit around each other?

And so I believe them.

Garbage Bags

—

When I was eight—
My mother told me that the only thing that “obese people” could wear were garbage bags.
Think: Hefty Ultra Flex.
Pulled around their bulging bodies with clothes pins and knots,
tied by fingers too big for wedding bands.

I grew up learning that
At ten—
Unless I changed things for myself,
my prom dress would be have to be custom made out of bed sheets.
Stitched together by my own poor handiwork,
that I learned so I could add extra fabric to my waistbands—
Because couldn’t tell my mother what size I actually wore.
Because I was already “too difficult to shop for”.
And I was afraid—
That if she knew about the climbing sizes of my jeans,
that the already small meals of salads and sometimes chicken
would shrink faster than the numbers on the scale in my room
when I stepped on it each night.

This is a poem for every kid who ever grew up believing
that they should grow out their hair to hide their lack of collarbones.
Who learned how to convince themselves they were full
because they were taught to never finish all the food on their plate.
For the eleven year olds who look down at their own body—
and blame themselves.

Because they do not believe that are beautiful.
Because they weren’t gifted with a quick metabolism,
or some sort of athleticism,
or even, just some basic fucking coordination.
Who, when thinking about their own creation
came to the conclusion that something somewhere
must have just stuck a pair of flat feet on a potato, gave it a brain, and said,
“figure it out”.

So at thirteen
each time they take off their clothes,
they wish that that three inches off flesh would come off with them.

This is a poem for every desperate teenager—
Who at sixteen,
thought that they might not make it to seventeen,
because last week they went up from a size six to a size seven.
And they still remember that time when they were eleven.
And they still blame themselves.

This is not a poem about self-image
This is a poem about self-respect.

Quick History Lesson.
Gender Studies 101.
In 1963 Marilyn Monroe was a size 14
Which is equivalent to today’s size 8.
Today she wouldn’t even qualify to be a plus size model,
because they max out around a size 6.
Congratulations America.
For one of the wealthiest countries,
We now have the one of the highest populations
of people suffering from self-inflicted starvation

Today, kids are growing up in a culture that teaches them math,
by teaching them how to count calories.
That teaches us that we can suppress those pesky three o’clock pangs of hunger,
brought on after our lunch consisting of—
A bowl of baby spinach sans the dressing,
a glass of lemon water,
ice cubes,
and big gusts of wind—
Through green tea,
a handful of almonds,
and just a small side of our sanity.

That on Wednesdays we get to splurge with one whole rewarding square of dark chocolate.
What we’re supposed to do with the rest of the bar I’m not quite sure,
But I am certain, we are definitely not supposed to eat it.

A culture, that tell us finally,
Front page, Cosmo 2013—
there IS an exercise we can do while sitting down and drinking our morning coffee.
Because don’t forget bikini season is only four months away.

And of course,
that all of this is just them, trying to help us
“to be the best you, that you can be this November”

I know I am not the first person to call Cosmo out on their bullshit
But I know that this is the first time I can admit how
It took me twenty years to learn that
“Obese”
is a term used by bullies.
And that everyone should eat whatever the fuck they want—
as long as they’re happy.

That being fit does not equal being healthy.
That being healthy does not equal being thin.
And that there is more to being healthy than being able to fit into a number.
And most days I wake up wondering—
what is there to be so proud of about reducing ourselves?

This is not a poem about self-image.
This is a disclaimer.
Saying that—
Knowing this information does not mean that you’re a feminist
It just means that you are paying attention.
And yes, that you should be very angry.

Because if we don’t do something drastic soon,
there are going to be eight year olds who suffocate
trying to fit into trash bags.
Because they believe,
that because of their body,
that is the only place they will ever belong.

Patches

—

Some nights I have to slip Ativan in my tea,
just so I can sleep as soundly as I did in your arms—
Because the Chamomile alone is not enough
to burn the taste of your skin from my taste-buds.
Because I can still recite all of the dates of all the days I wanted to slip into the skins
of the names you muttered in your sleep.

This is the first time I am being honest with myself—
The words I speak are no longer borrowed and bent to look like my own.

When I was with you the words came like waves
crashing against the inside of my skin—
until they were leaking out through my pores,
and I was sweating out, nervous paragraphs
in puddles all over the floor—
But you still didn’t understand.

Let’s try this again,
You were the oath I made in the light of a smoker’s kiss.
You were the first sip of red wine.
You were the first hit—
Too harsh and far too real.
I could feel your realness in my marrow—
reminding me that we could die tomorrow or next Tuesday,
So we better make these moments count.
You were the first lazy light of spring—
springing to life lazy bodies.
You were last second I thought I could hold my breath—
and you were the first breath I took after.
You were the cigarettes at 11 and 3 am.
And I’ve been sticking on strangers like nicotine patches—
But none of them have kept me from craving you.

You see, 
I wanted to hang you in a museum,
but you shoved me in your back pocket—
Like an old recite or a bad peach
shoved in the back corner of the back row—
too bruised from too many rough hands,
always grabbed at—
But never good enough to take home.

In the same way I was never any good at writing love poems,
I was never any good at loving the right things.
Like a kid with 26 cavities loves candy—
Each time you bit my neck I fell in love with the bruises.
Some nights I still press my fingertips hard against my collarbones
trying to re-create your violet imprints.

Some nights—
The only things that get me to the morning are cheap whiskey and bad poetry.
But not even all the slant rhymes and slurred words can keep me from writing of you.

These days—
I’ve been writing so much they’ve been calling me unstable—
like a half-broken table.
And I keep trying to shove things under the too-short leg,
But nothing seems to hold me up—
like the way you said my name.

I still shake each time someone tries to lean on me
I used to be someone that people could lean on.

And these people,
they keep telling me to just forget. 
To stomp out your memory like a dying flame.
But it’s the beginning of November
And I want to remember,
so I just keep blowing on the embers,
because some days, it’s the memories of you that are the only things that still keep me warm. 

We need our memories like we need our bones. 
Let them build up under your skin until they form zits on the tip of your nose.
Poke at them until they burst, for everyone to see.
Even though your mother told you to use lots of cover up and let them be—
I am so fucking tired
of trying to cover up the things that I cannot control.

So call me crazy one last time.
Because I do not want to burn like the sun, darling.
I want to glow like the moon.
Until I can hear all the howls,
of all the lonely people, 
fill the air.
So I would know I am not alone.

Bellybuttons

—

By 19—
she was the walking representation of everything she hoped she would never become.
Days were hard, but nights were always harder.
She brews coffee at eleven because she is terrified of her dreams
and searches for inspiration at the ends of cigarettes,
because she likes the way the smoke stings the walls of her throat—
like every self-loathing insult she has ever swallowed.

Stressed and depressed but always well-dressed—
she hides her melancholy under layers of empty arrogance,
stitched into the seams of her worn out boots and ironically trendy ill-fitting sweaters.
By the time the unwelcome sunlight slips through the gaping mouths of her yawning blinds,
she can already feel the warm fright of the day creeping down her fingers.

Some people are not made for mornings—
it takes her 3 cups of black coffee and 150mg of social stigma,
just to get her blood moving.
Too young for Parkinsons—
her hands tremble from too much caffeine and too little confidence.
By three she can feel the longing
for the dust bunnies that had gathered around her organs while she was sleeping,
gnawing away at her rib cage.

She didn’t ask for any of this.
Her clumsy words trip over her taste buds more frequently than she trips over her own feet.
She must have slept in the day when we learned how to make sense of these broken syllables
that clash and bang and leave bruises on the insides of our too-soft skulls.
And now, she is left scrambling, trying to speak in a language
that still feels foreign on her tongue.

She writes in illegible scratches and scribbles because she doesn’t believe
that anything she writes down is worth trying to decipher.
And her hands are still too small
for all of the things she wishes to create anyways.

Most of the things she owns,
are either lost, broken or just completely useless.
And most days,
she still feels far too much or nothing at all,
but she is still standing here trying.
Because she refuses to believe the things that she does not understand.

At 4—
she was told that bellybuttons are fingerprints left by God.
So she spent the next 10 years trying to phone heaven,
but not once did anyone ever pick up.
Now she knows that bellybuttons are just another means of pissing off your parents
that day you felt alone.

At 20—
she hopes to finally realize that there is nothing romantic about her awkward apologies,
or the way she feels claustrophobic in crowds,
and only finds comfort among trees,
Because she understands why they spend their whole lives
trying to hold hands with the clouds.
At what age do we lose our sympathy?

All her life, she has felt the heavy sighs of lonely creatures
fill the spaces in-between her vertebrae.
She knows you will always be able to hear her harsh cracks of compassion
each time she twists her tired spine.

Keep Off

—

Today I went out to find the meaning of life.
Plato said,
“Why it is the pursuit of happiness of course.”
Selfish philosophers.
How can there be happiness without running water?

So I asked the humble blades of grass,
“What does it mean to be happy?”
And they looked up at me, with their,
Thin, blank, faces.
And they told me to get the fuck on the sidewalk.