Its cold and its dark and im thinking about fathers and what it means to love. Because the first person who taught me the shape of love crushed me in his fist and now im scared that every one i fall for will die with claw marks in their chest. Im worried that i don’t know what it means to love without destruction.

I will cling and i will claw my chest open and ask if you think my lungs are beautiful. I will lie on a concrete floor and bleed and hope it’s pretty. Suffering is like art if you do it right.

Tell me who left first, because in the haze i cant quite remember. If it was you, i forgive you. If it was me, i hope you hate me for it forever.

I’ve spent more years trying to reach into the mirror and reshape my skin even if the broken glass cuts me than i ever did finding it beautiful. And sometimes i look at the blue in my eyes and the scars on my stomach and think “someone could love this” and sometimes i think i’ll only find peace beneath a gravestone.

And if i did, would you write my epitaph? Would it be kind? Would you claw into the stone with your nails and tell the world i lived and someone loved me for it?

Would you forgive me for leaving? It would be easier than forgiving me for what i did to stay.

The strings tying me to life are tangled these days, they fray and twist and tighten around my wrists like restraints.

Sometimes i scream at the sky like it’s my fathers ghost and i ask who i was supposed to be? I ask where are you? Why aren’t you here?

I hate flying. I hate getting too close to the stars.

There are a million poems about people being made out of stardust. Hell hath no fury like a poet with a science metaphor. We love to strip the world bare and claw through the dirt looking for something beautiful. How long have humans stared at the sky and found home? How long have we buried our friends in the dirt. How long have we looked up and down and found more? How long have we traced shapes into the stars and told their stories? When does it end?

Should it?

We climbed our way to the moon and never went back. A checkmark on a list to prove something to a god that doesn’t exist. A challenge. How dare he think anything is out of reach.

The universe is expanding, did you know that? Did you know that every second the edge of life gets further away? There will always be something we can't see. There will always be places we can’t go. There will always be rocks we can’t claim, stick our flag into, and pretend to own.

One day the sun is going to collapse in on itself. Did you know how fragile life is? Did you know we live every day on the precipice of destruction? This is not poetry. There is nothing beautiful about mortality. There is nothing pretty about death. One day the sun will cave in on itself and burn everything we’ve built, one day Ozymandias crumbles to dust. Atlantis sinks. The stars burn out. Checkmate.

We claw life out from the jaws of death and think we’ve won something. We haven’t.

To live is to suffer, did you know that?

I don’t know who im talking to. The sky doesn’t answer your questions. It doesn’t matter how many telescopes you send to ask the stars why we’re here. Sound doesn’t travel in space.

Do you know how much we made out of nothing? How much of our history is purely a riot against insignificance? How much blood spilled, temples built, statues carved, wars fought and lost and won and bones buried to prove we were here? How much of the past is just a teenaged nobody screaming that something happened here, something mattered here. How much time do we spend begging our descendants to listen to us?

There is something violent about fading out of existence. There is peace in it too. Aristotle will never rest, and Shakespeare will be studied by people he never knew until the world ends.

What is more cruel? To be forgotten or remembered?

I don’t know who i’m talking to.

One day the sun will cave in on itself. One day we will fall through a crease in the center of the galaxy. Nothing is immortal. Why do we beg for it to be?

i don't know who im talking to. none of us do.

i want to kiss every pigment of the tattoos on your skin

i want to worship you

i want to build an altar of sweat and sun and spring flowers

and lay you on it like something precious

i want to hunt down every freckle

on the skin that haunts me every time i close my eyes

and brand it with my fingertips

i want to hold you like something breakable

i want to break you

i want to find god in the dip where your hips meet your waist. where your neck meets your shoulders.

i want to mark up your collarbones with teeth and adoration

i want to love you the way the sun loves the mountain tops at dawn

the way spring loves the cherry trees

i want to kiss you like you're made of holy water

and im going straight to hell

so i take deep breaths

because really,

what else do you want from me?

what else can I give?

you have wrung me dry

you have chewed me up and spat me back out again

and I have written so many poems

about hope and survival

about flowers growing in sidewalk cracks

about the patterns I've carved into my ribs

about sunrises and stars

that i wonder if you've taken all my words from me

i dont think i have any room for those kinds of poems anymore

i think maybe all i have left to give is the air in my lungs

the blood in my veins

i don't know what shape my heart is anymore

i think maybe it's crying

i think maybe it's crippled and bruised and begging

i used to think defeat would feel like a bullet wound, but it doesn't

it feels like the world inside me is shutting down

it feels like falling from a 5 story building and not breaking a single bone

i have nothing left for you to take

but please, don't let that stop you,

you can have the salt from my tears

you can have the oxygen from my lungs

you can have my ashes

you can have the dust and the shadows i leave behind

you can have the marble of my tombstone

you can have the

you can have

you can

you

y

And this is for the people

Who can only fall asleep

When they imagine someone holding them

Here’s to the words we never heard

And the love we never got

Here’s to the worlds we never saw

And the lives we haven’t lived

Here's to our messy journals

And half baked second chances

Here’s to fairy lights

And overflowing bookshelves

Here’s to hours spent alone

And weeks spent silent

Here’s to the worlds we build in our heads

And break down in our dreams

Here’s to the insomniac over sleepers

And the cynical optimists

Who put the hope into hopeless romantic

Here’s to the mediocre overachievers

And our overflowing planners

Here’s to the people we almost were,

And the pedestals that mark their graves

Here’s to the midnight cigarettes

And the stolen deep breaths

Here’s to everything we haven’t learned yet

Here’s to the flowers that grow

in the spaces between our ribs

And the in cracks in the streets of our hometowns.

Here’s to the places you’ll go.

Here’s to the things you’ll build.

Here’s to the people you’ll love

And the ones who might love you back.

Here’s to a book that’s empty

And the pencil on the floor next to your desk.

bravery is in the flowers that grow

through cracks in crumbling pavements

in their bent stems and crushed petals.

A resolute brokenness

that seems to whisper

I have been broken before,

I have been shredded and torn

and troddenn on

and I am still here, and you can't change that

and apparently,

neither can I.

My heart beats,

even when I don't want it to.

It pumps blood through my veins

It times the tempo of my breathing

a metronome in the shape of a clock

that counts the seconds i try to steal from it

that watches my youth slip through my fingers

trying to catch success like smoke.

My heart is a glorious mess of scar tissue.

It loves me when I beg it to stop

it squeezes and grows to make room for every new sunrise

when I am particularly hopeful

I imagine its craters and hollows match the moon

when I am not,

I imagine it shapeshifts

takes on the form of a fist

closed tight enough to leave

crescent-shaped scars.

the pulse in my wrist taunts me

with a timed ode to existence

a sonnet of survival

That seems to whisper

Who do you think you are

To think you could break me

In any way that matters.

(I take a deep breath and listen to the triumphant beat of my heart. I am, I am, I am)

you look at me

and I am carved out of marble

I am the Sistine chapel

You trace patterns into my skin,

connect the freckles on my thigh into a constellation

you study me like the stars

I hadn't accounted for the possibility

That I could be loved like that.

and when you have left

and the altar we built together crumbles,

I will always know

that you loved me enough,

to turn me into art

i found you at an altar of ivy and gold

we tarnished the ground we stood on

spilt blood and salt and made it holy

and i have never believed in anything

bigger than myself

but in the silence

and the glow in your eyes

I have found something to pray for

Before you go, do me a favour,

don't go kissing stars

and looking for gold.

Because no good has ever come,

from pedestals and promises.

And no love has ever grown,

without dirt in the soil.

cite your sources.

I spent years in a classroom

learning how to pretend my thoughts were someone else's

learning how to quote Plato instead of

that one time i spent too long looking at the sunrise and suddenly the whole world made sense

learning how to trim ideas down,

too big to cram into textbook margins or 12 pt times new roman (double spaced).

i shoved ideas too huge for the open sky

into 800 words, 3 pages single sided

and i learned to pretend like what i was saying still mattered.

tell the story of the whole world

in ten minutes

anything over 9 minutes 59 seconds doesn't count.

you are only worth how quickly you can talk

before losing your breath

how many words in the lines

artful cursive, before your hands start to cramp and the clock runs out

and anything you had left to say fades out of existence

as if it had no value outside an A4 page, college ruled and stained with expectation