Arms

When I look at my arms, I don’t think strong.

I think not there yet,

I think this weakness is wrong.

 

I’m a loose thread that has been pulled apart for too long,

I thought maybe if I kept pulling, I would someday manage to forget.

When I look at my arms, I don’t think strong.

 

My arms are an open canvas, a bleeding song

And I can’t wait for them to get soaked in red, and yet

I think this weakness is wrong.

 

My fingers tremble, ache, long

For a single blade of color to wash away the regret.

When I look at my arms, I don’t think strong.

 

When I close my eyes I see flowers blooming like a dying song,

I see carefully written words and a withering silhouette,

I think this weakness is wrong.

 

When I think strong, I think of shaking hands when I was 16 years old,

Petals cascading from my lashes and the taste of blood, lips wet.

When I look at my arms, I don’t think strong.

I think this weakness is wrong.

L.

Fears that I have Lived

You don’t conquer a fear, you face it.

Every day for the rest of your life.

Sometimes you do it head on,

others you politely ask it to move aside.

 

Most days, you stare at it right in the face

and you know this will be the day.

This is the day you’ll be paralyzed by its knowledge of you,

by what it knows and what you don’t yet know.

You’ll stand there, frozen,

while everyone else walks by  and wonder,

“Why aren’t you moving?”

 

Because while you face fear, others can’t see it.

As you stand there, frozen and motionless

fear can see you, can feel you.

It traces your thoughts into clay like skin,

sinking fingerprints into a glass that was never taught how to be glass.

 

You were never meant to be clay.

You were probably steal before the fear came.

Glass and sand and pretty fingers with well-kept nails.

But the fear saw you and it wanted you.

 

So you stare at each other as people come and go,

and they wonder “Why aren’t you moving?”

but fear holds you for ransom so you cannot speak,

cannot see beyond black pools of loneliness and anger.

You can’t see beyond the chasm that is yourself.

 

Because fear wants you in the only way you can want yourself,

it wants to feed off you,

wants you to understand that it knows you because it is you.

 

Fear owns you like you have never owned anything before.

 

You cannot conquer fear,

you become it.

You welcome it with open arms and loose wrists.

You twist it into words others understand

until it’s just another part of you.

 

You don’t conquer a fear, you face it.

Every day for the rest of your life,

confronting it for who it is.

Sometimes you do it head on,

waving your hand against your reflection in the mirror,

others you politely ask it to move aside,

twisting careful feet in sheets to get up in the morning.

 

You don’t conquer fear,

you become it.

You own it.

It owns you.

L.

Girls

Girls are quiet, even when mad

Girls put their head downs, especially when they don’t agree.

If someone is talking, agree.

When everyone’s quiet, stay still.

 

Girls are quiet and sweet,

Girls are quiet.

They don’t disagree with others,

They know who their betters are.

Girls don’t know better.

 

I remember I was a Quiet Girl.

I remember when I grew up and I realized Quiet Girl was tired.

Quiet Girl was tired of being Quiet.

Quiet girl couldn’t breathe.

Quiet girl tripped on her own hair,

Quiet girl could run on tears for days.

 

And then Quiet Girl realized she could run.

So she did.

 

Quiet Girl ran toward the exit of her bubble,

She was mangled and hurt

But she wasn’t quiet.

She had glass for hands and hair short

‘like a boy’.

The rest she left behind in the prison.

 

Glass Girl had a mirror,

And she was pretty,

And she thought that was stupid.

 

Glass girl cowered from mirrors,

Glass girl was ‘not like the other girls’

Even though she was,

Even though that’s everything she needed to be,

A Girl.

 

Glass Girl, was quiet

But not like Quiet Girl.

Her silence was a defiance; a sentence in its own.

Glass Girl was Icy Girl.

Glass Girl was a bitch.

 

Glass girl was cold hands and sardonic laughter,

But she was also fear,

Fear of others, of being seen, of seeing herself.

Glass Girl couldn’t feel.

Glass Girl felt too much.

 

So Glass Girl was Quiet,

But she wasn’t Quiet Girl.

She wasn’t like the other girls.

 

Was she?

 

 

She was.

L.

Bubbles

I spent most of my life held inside a bubble.

It was soft and made of rubber and sand.

If you looked at it in the right light, you might’ve seen the shards,

Glass shards.

Everyone who tried to get in was meant to get hurt

And anytime I tried to leave

my hands, my arms, my mouth, my eyes

everything would be soaked in bubbly red.

 

I guess I always thought it was easier to breathe inside the bubble,

Especially at times when it wasn’t.

I loved breathing in air in short gasping breaths,

One panicked inhale followed by a loud wheezing of air.

In a way, I guess the air always tasted like tangerines and copper.

Oh, how I loved tangerines.

Oh, how I miss the copper.

Bitten lips drank in greedily a scent that tasted like dusty water

And rusty air,

But it was the only air I knew how to breathe,

And, God how I breathed.

Breath, after breath, after breath, after sob,

Until I couldn’t tell what was oxygen and what was my own exhale.

 

The bubble didn’t make me unreachable,

But it did make me wary.

If you asked me a question,

You may not have gotten an answer…

But

If you took your time,

And had patience,

I may have endured the glass shards just so I could pretend to hold you.

 

In the bubble things were always too much

Too big clothes, worn shoes, thick eyebrows, and chokingly long hair.

A nose that was too big, and eyes sunk into a forehead that could be called a head.

A body too thin, hands too small,

And social skills so bad they often made me breathless.

In the bubble everything was a mixture of old and broken pieces.

But I was happy.

 

I was so happy.

 

I was so scared.

L.

The Problem

I guess that’s part of the problem,

when you obsess over something it never leaves.

It grows on you, not like cancer but like dodder.

It feeds on your love and passion and for a while it makes you beautiful.

 

That’s the second part of the problem.

You are beautiful.

You are beautiful in a way that makes a car wreck feel like breathing.

Your brand of pretty invites me home when home is a thought that has never existed.

 

You are beautiful.

Beautiful soul, beautiful skin, beautiful anger.

You’re so imperfect it hurts to touch you under the sunlight.

But the moon, oh the moon brings out new things that make you perfect.

 

I have loved you with every breath left in my body

and I’ve hated you in similar despair.

Your body is tinged with an anger too fragile to touch,

your mouth opens between breathless sobs no one can hear.

 

But I hear the tunes in your heart and the blood in your veins,

every particle in my body cries out for yours

with tears that taste like raindrops and dumb fingers longing to touch.

 

I guess that’s the third part of the problem.

Touch.

 

You hold my body like a weapon,

not a means to and end but the end itself.

I am whole inside your hands but empty beside your body.

 

When we touch it’s like an eclipse,

everything is

gone….

…. but there’s light.

But there’s nothing.

 

A kiss upon my lips is like the sealing of a promise,

the signing of a will.

“We’re doomed,” you tell me. “We’re nothing.”

I am used to nothing.

 

“I once was nothing and I didn’t die.”

I want to tell you,

trace the words with shaky lips and uncertain fingers.

I didn’t die…

I wish I could remind you that death has a taste, yes

but so does life.

 

You taste like the bitter ending of one and the sweet beginning of the other.

The passion fruit suspended between your life and my death.

 

And still you hold me like a weapon,

my lips like the barrel of a gun sweet against your temple

and my hands clawing pathways across your arms,

my arms.

 

That’s the final part of the problem.

If we were always nothing,

how come it was always us?

 

L.

Pedestal

I’ve built myself a pedestal, so I can stand tall and high

It’s mostly made up of stories,

(Though there’s also some pretty lies).

It was easy to climb it and even more to look down from.

See, the words help you drown out sounds,

people and places; memories of things that hurt.

 

So that when you look down,

you can only see the memories

Of the time you created the lie.

There’s no way you’ll get hurt up there,

Words are yours to take, no one can hurt you

If you’re standing high up in the air.

 

But words make us prisoners

And sometimes they’re enough to take us down.

Just tell me a word,

Just one word.

 

And if that seems impossible a simple sentence will do,

And drag me down from my ankles to the cold reality of the ground

Remind me in one sentence what it means to survive

Gag me with new words and teach me their meaning

Show me the pedestal was worthless.

Show me the truth in human kindness.

L.

Bad Days

When I was younger,

I used to call the days my depression took me under its spell

“The dark days”.

It was a phrase I read somewhere

and it seemed to fit.

 

I was having a dark day,

I was shrouded in darkness,

but the darkness was warm,

inviting.

 

It whispered things in my ear

that made me feel like I was home.

Oh, how I hated the dark days.

(Oh, but how I loved them).

 

When I grew up,

I started calling them

“Bad Days”.

I knew that “bad” was just another word for

“Yeah, I’m fine”

and that the trembling in my hands would stop

…Eventually.

 

I used “bad” the way other people used “sunny”.

The description of a state obvious to anyone looking.

But no one was looking.

 

I call them “Shit Days” now.

“I’m having a shit day.”

It sounds both like a joke and an exclamation mark.

 

The darkness doesn’t seem inviting anymore,

it still tries to hold me,

but those arms,

made of darkness that is me but also something else,

are suffocating me.

 

On Shit Days I’m tired and moody,

ready to fight the world

but maybe also cry?

A little?

 

On Shit Days I want nothing more than to be swallowed

consumed by the stifling arms of the darkness that is me,

and the darkness that is other.

I long for a home long gone,

the memory of comfort the darkness used to bring.

 

But the home is nothing now,

The darkness is no longer my friends.

And the arms, that hold and harm and live,

brand me with a touch of darkness more alien than myself.

 

I am mostly a prisoner of the darkness when we’re together.

The funny thing is, we always are.

L.