- in my dreams I feel his hands on me. / whenever I walk by him I instinctively drag down my sleeves, pull my hoodie tighter. The body he stained is always on display. I scrub my skin a little too hard in the shower, trying to get him off of me, trying to shed any cell on my body he might have touched. / This is the poem I never wanted to write. Because writing makes it real, / and I don't want this memory on paper. I only want it erased.
- I've begun to censor your name like a curse word. / Using your name would make you human when you have only ever been a heartless nightmare to me.
- There's blood on the bathroom floor again, my mother would be ashamed. My head is the one that's guilty, but my soul is always blamed. Three months older, three months clean, I thought that I might win. But once again I find myself digging graves into my skin.
- These words are venom purged from my veins and poured out on paper. These words are poetic poison.
- I am the little girl in every fable, every folktale. The powerless child, the innocent face, / I catch a glimpse of the wolf in the shadows. / and I realize he is wearing your clothing. You have turned me into prey. And you have always been the predator.
- What I would do if finding happiness made me unable to write anymore.
- I work so hard to be the hero. But then I sabotage myself,
- Darkness awaits me; I hear it whispering my name, calling me back to the place I seem to belong.
- Hard as I try, I am not the girl poets speak of. I am not made up of ocean tides and my heart is not a crystal drum; it will always be a weapon more than anything. I am an incomplete masterpiece, full of crossed-out words and changes.
- I want so badly to spill out my soul onto these pages, but some things are stuck. Some memories cling to the sides of my spirit no matter how much I try to scrape them out.
- I have become an ever-growing ring of defences so that no one can find what is at my core.
- For once, I wish I could be the poem instead of the poet I've been.
- I write about this - the sadness, the backpack of melancholy that digs into my shoulder blades - because each poem isn't authentic enough. I keep pouring out my soul, but the emotion gets lost in translation. I write about this because there is nothing else inside me to dig up.
- Experiment: wait and see how much they can take of me before they leave.
- Smooth the splinters others have left. I'm sure a few of mine are still embedded in his skin.
- Don't tell me my brokenness is beautiful. This is not beautiful. This nearly killed me. This is not something for you to romanticize.
- I know you want to drown yourself in the sadness. It's comforting to let it surround you, heart pulsing, lungs aching as you feel it overwhelm every inch of your skin and diffuse into your cells.
- There are times that I am doing so well, I stop taking my meds. And suddenly I feel like the light switch has flipped off. And suddenly I feel like I am not better because of my hard work. And suddenly I feel like a fraud. I try to remind myself that the brain is an organ, that this is a disease, / so I swallow my pride along with my pills and let myself get better.
- Sometimes my thoughts are so jagged they chip my teeth on their way out of my mouth.
- I look at him out of the corner of my eye, past the rim of my glasses. My brain reminds me that I am a silent tornado he does not deserve to get caught up in.
- I am not your beautiful broken mess to clean up. My mental illness is not a riddle for you to solve, a decoded message for you to unscramble. I already know the answer: therapy. And medication. And pouring out my thoughts in ink instead of blood.
- Be grateful that time will heal the wounds but leave the scars. How else will you remember all that you've survived?
jul 31 2019 ∞
jul 31 2019 +
jul 31 2019 +