“It takes everything inside of me not to pick up the phone and call you in the middle of the night after the darkness has settled into my skin. Instead, I conjure your image and paint you lonely and afraid. At only five feet tall, I loom over your tiny, weak shoulders and write verse after verse about how much I loathe your stupid teeth. I wish it were that easy and that you could just go away. Why didn’t you just pack up and move to Washington? The climate is colder; maybe they would’ve noticed that your heart is too. I want to spit in your face and rip open your throat, go digging for the moment when you stopped respecting me; sometimes I think killing you would be easier than accepting that maybe you never loved me. Maybe this was all made up. Still, I keep writing your bloody eulogy, turning you into terrible art, until I stop mourning the loss of someone who was never really there at all.”

“Maybe we’ll get back together. Maybe you’ll realize I’m the only person who will let you put everything but me first. Maybe you’ll call me, two in the morning, drunk, and say you can’t do this without out me and I’ll ask what time it is, but it won’t matter, because I’ll know that I love you in every way, drunk included. Maybe I’ll realize that you were the worst thing that ever happened to me. Maybe I’ll understand our natural toxicity. Maybe I’ll see that if I’m willing to die for you, I shouldn’t be with you. Maybe I’ll constantly remind myself of all the ways you fucked me over. Maybe I’ll move on. Maybe we’ll be friends, but, I heard that the only reasons you become friends with the one you loved is because you’re still in love with them, or you never were. I loved you. So what does that say about me? About us?”

“I may think of you softly from time to time. But I’ll cut off my hand before I ever reach for you again.”

the way we were with people - teen suicide

“If this poem was honest I’d call it “Your new girlfriend is ugly and I hate her.” Or maybe, “If she wasn’t your new girlfriend we would probably get along.” Or “If she wasn’t your new girlfriend I wouldn’t think she was so frumpy.” Or “I know, she’s curvier than I am, she’s just the way you like it, maybe how easily my body fit curled inside of yours has been the problem all along.” Or, “I know why you like her: she doesn’t cry as much as I do.” I could call it “I don’t know what you see in her.” Or, “Maybe all you saw in me was my looks.” Or, “You know what? Maybe she has a great personality.” And now that I’m being honest, I might as well be cruel, because what I really want to call this poem is “It’s not love when she lets you fuck other women, and it’s not love when you complain behind her back.” And I know, our mess is not her fault. She didn’t plan on loving a man whose heart got so far away from him that he couldn’t catch up with it. Because if this poem was honest I’d call it “She’s not me, and say what you want but my name has been stuck in your throat since we left.” It’s not your new girlfriend that’s the problem. It’s the miles between us that made it necessary for you to acquire one. And it’s you, really, you’re the problem. You and your inability to be alone. You and your desperate need for a pair of legs to bury your heart inside of. You thought if you shoved it in deep enough it wouldn’t come back biting.”

therapist: i want to get to know the real you! :-)