playlistsandpoetry

[playlistsandpoetry]

[playlistsandpoetry]

things that have been playing on my mind

i. the day a paramedic told me about a 62 year old man that called for his dead mother in his last breaths, the way that holding in the knowledge that my mother has been responsible for many deaths that have taken place within the shell of my being threatened to squeeze all the air out of my windpipe

ii. the dull yellow color of the tablets i swallow down with cold water everyday because my mind dreams in colors that don't align with reality, the pills bring me down from the clouds but i can no longer write about the sky, i say that im a born artist but maybe im just a sick mind acing the façade of an artist

iii. if a person telling a lie believes the lie they are telling they are no longer lying. i say im a good person. i say i mean no harm, that im gentle and kind and the world has been wholly unkind to me, but if a person telling a lie believes the lie they are telling they are no longer lying.

iv. i try so hard to hate myself for the things i know i should but i like getting a taste of what it feels like to be the kind of person that hurts the kind of person i used to be, guilt for being the perpetrator will never outweigh the relief of no longer being the victim

v. i wish i knew what it is like to be hugged

[playlistsandpoetry]

If the world comes to an end I don't want to close my eyes without feeling like I lived

[playlistsandpoetry]

i haven't felt beautiful in months

[playlistsandpoetry]

sometimes i think that ill save my life, at least a little bit, i let myself think that maybe.. one day ill know the warmth of touch and of the naivety it takes to love something as soft as a human and know what it means to float senselessly under the shine of the sun beaming on my skin. sometimes i want it bad enough, sometimes i let myself dream a little bit. but- other times im terrified that ill end up dying on the same bathroom floor i spent my entire childhood cutting my skin open on, that my fate has always been to let the darkness eat me alive. can you listen to me for a second? here is a confession im afraid to let anyone hear: i don't want to die. i want to live. i hide from the sun- but i'd do anything to feel worthy of its shine

[playlistsandpoetry]

things I should write poems about.

the girl who loves me like i wish my mother did and how she told me she wants to die and how my heart fell to my stomach when she did

the boy who loved seeing me naked, the way he loved the breasts under my clothes and the emotion beneath my words. and how he's got a girlfriend anyway

sex. the sheer beauty and poetry to it. the way bodies react to other bodies. the way there's nothing more intimate than  my tongue on your skin and how, even when people try to convince you otherwise,  there's nothing shameful about seeking solace in the body of another.

how my lovers aren't people to me. theyre not a future and past and the idea of kids and a house. they're just somewhere to lose myself. how ive perfected the art of escaping myself through the act of getting high on humans and the stories they tell and the way their hair smells.

[playlistsandpoetry]

anywhere is safer than here

[playlistsandpoetry]

i think if you want something long enough, your longing starts to shapeshift, the way that a dog turns all snapping jaws and bared teeth if you dont feed it for too long. if you're lucky your longing will learn to take the shape of a river that never stops pouring, and if you're not, before you know it, the longing has transformed itself into a knife.

what i mean by this is that loving is an inherently selfish act. i have made a habit out of running language dry with all the different ways i know how to call myself a wound, but even a wound can pour blood into another wound until it is infected. what i mean by this, is that i tried to make you a part of my misery. what i mean by this, is- even if a monster learns to love, there will always be some element of its true nature hiding behind the curtains.

sometimes i wonder if i am the only one who knows how to love the way that loving was meant to be. other times, i wonder if my way of loving looks so different from everyone else's because i blur the lines between love and pain until the bond turns sacrilegious, until it is unbearable

[playlistsandpoetry]

there's a poem living inside of me for everyone I have ever loved

[playlistsandpoetry]

some things you should know about me

i. all my closest friends are a few lifetimes away. i drink away the years clinking glasses each night with all of their ghosts. i heard my lover from 2 years ago moved to another state but sometimes i hear his heavy footsteps walking through my brain, over my heart and under my rib cage making it harder to breathe. i think this body might be the memory of him more than it is me.

ii. some days i don’t take my medication. not because i forget to, but because i want to know more about the the girl who the medication makes disappear. i want to know if she really likes the upbeat music the anti-depressants have convinced her she does, i want her to remind me of all the reasons i should never forget what people did to me and list all the things about me that will never get better. i want to ask her if she’s the same pathetic broken girl as before and if it’s just the medicines lying to me and telling me she’s not.

iii.you have my permission not to love me. every time my feet touch the ground, the piece of land i stand on becomes a warzone, one between me who wants to leave and the ground that keeps my feet planted here. i understand, who wants to live where the skies are gray and war cries are found? you have my permission not to love me.

iv. i can’t remember the last time my mother touched me and i remember the last time my dad did too well. a mans anger and a women’s silence raised me, i am the child of raised fists and broken glasses. it’s hard to smile when i’m still picking shards of glass out of my feet from the glass door my father broke and trying to tape together the ripped up remains of my elementary school notebooks. it’s scary, the way a father’s anger grows and evolves into a child’s nightmares, the way screams turn into silent memories, the way something so loud can become almost invisible,

v. my eighth grade teacher told me that the most important part of a poem is the way you end it. i’ve learned that there are many ways to end a poem, but the best one is death.

[playlistsandpoetry]

i. ive started eating. and running a little less. and trying to unmemorize the number of calories in bread. i don’t think I’ll ever forget, but I’m trying to, and i guess that’s what recovery is. and so, i tell people that i once had an eating disorder, that im no longer sick but these frail bones know that i will never not have one, that the feeling of hunger can make me feel at home in ways he never can. it’s in the way shopping alone still scares me because my glance will linger too long on my body until i no longer want any new clothes. until i feel like i don’t deserve new clothes. its in the way that day before yesterday i didn’t have an appetite and I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t hungry or my mind was sick again. its in the way that love still feels wrong when I receive it without having to spill my guts onto the bathroom floor. its in the way I still feel like love is something to be earned, something to be earned by starvation.

ii. i don’t think the way i only feel pretty when my stomach is empty is a disorder anymore. it’s more like an organ. one sculpted by god just for me. i carry it everywhere. sometimes it sits quietly inside of me, and some days it’s so loud that im bedridden for days. its an organ that doesn’t react well with bread. or pasta. or milk. its an organ that can calculate the calories in the every plate put in front of it within a minute. its an organ that’s killing me, but surgery to get it removed is more than im willing to pay.

[playlistsandpoetry]

the leaves are gone, you should be too

[playlistsandpoetry]

he says he doesn’t feel anything, but i think about the little boy inside him that gets excited by the sound of the ocean, and smiles like a child at the mere thought of it, the man who understands art and poetry and reads jane austen, because isn’t love for the ocean more than nothing? isn’t that feeling, that heavy tug on your chest when you read something that somehow worded what you couldn’t more than nothing? isn’t that feeling when you sat with me and read poetry more than nothing? he thinks he’s capable of cruelty but sometimes when we’re clubbed inside 4 small walls, we have big thoughts to make up for lack of fresh air, our brain tries to make up for the feeling our heart craves and sometimes we have bad thoughts but they aren’t our fault, and i want him to know if he could befriend a being as gentle and as angry as me, his thoughts couldn’t be true. i want him to know he is kinder than he thinks and holds more goodness than he knows.

[playlistsandpoetry]

you ask me what my medicines taste like and i want to say they taste like i’m choking on the feeling of never being able to recover from this sick mind, instead i say they taste alright and we move on with mindless conversation

[playlistsandpoetry]

how to make me fall in love with you

i. don’t tell me i’m pretty, tell me you that love the way metaphors slip off my tongue every time i talk, like a tap that won’t stop flowing, and that you love the way that i carry countries at war inside my body and still know how to stand still.

ii. don’t ask me about my day. ask me what colour i feel like, ask me if i opened the blinds today, if the music sounded like noise or melody, talk to me in metaphors, they are my mother tongue.

iii. if i turn all the lights inside this house off, don’t ask me turn them on. i know how to. some days i will be sad, and i will want to be. this sadness has woven itself into every inch of my body and sometimes it’s hard to want it gone when it’s the only one who has stayed this long. and on those days communicate with me in silence, only once you understand my silence will you be able to comprehend my words.

iv. late at night whisper the story about the time when you were small and your father broke your heart and how you don’t think you’ve recovered. show me you aren’t scared of being seen, you aren’t scared of my eroding waves of love that will come after to take away the pain of the past.

v. tell me about your favourite book or the last movie you watched or the song that made you cry last night, fill the space between us with something real, tell me how the movie broke your heart and you want to read the book again

vi. sit with me as we perform mundane tasks. cleaning dishes sounds a lot less like a chore done while laughing over a

[playlistsandpoetry]

i remember you telling me that im made up of the colours you'd find in a van gogh painting, i wanted to say that i felt like his suicide note. i didn’t. because that would’ve been an unravelling, and an unravelling implies that there is an end you're trying to reach. and in my end there is no starry night. i’d rather be untouched than have you know that there is no art here, except the ones on my thighs. my entire life seems to have been a prolonged act of death. is living worth it when i only do it from others perception of me?

[playlistsandpoetry]

I can’t love anyone more beautiful than me, I can’t love the boy who seems like god came down and sculpted him with his own hands, I can’t love the girl who grew up with a father who never hurt her mother, who never had to know what it’s like to broken by your own family, I can’t love perfection, I know this is wrong, but it’s so hard to love someone when all you see every time you look at them is everything you’re not.