lay me down tonight in my linen and curls

Last night I plucked the moon from the sky and shoved it straight down my throat. All this time they've told us it was made of curdled milk. It was made of sugar cookie dough and crinkled happily down my throat as it made its way down. The sugar dust stayed on my fingers and I sucked it all out from under my nail beds while I thought of you, no longer able to see the moon gazing down at you.

You didn't deserve her. The moon is made of pure dust and smells like fresh tulips in the first garden sprout of spring. She couldn't stand to look at you as you made your way down the street each night, sneaking in and out, promising love to one and yanking it away from another.

I drove comfortably down the street toward home, missing all of the usual potholes because these were my roads. I followed gently along the curves like how I trace the space between the moles on my arm. I trace them myself, while your fingers rot off and twist lifelessly down in the cement of your heart. I trace them and feel the moon bubbling in my throat and glowing in my chest.

via *

all we can do is keep breathing

There are some words that just sound exactly like what they are. They taste like how they feel when they play across your teeth. Bite. Love. Choke. Breathe.

Breathe.

I'm the world record champion for holding my breath. I held my breath once for twenty minutes. Then I held it for five months. Then I held it for one year.

The ghosts stole my breath and replaced it with shattered glass that got caught in my lungs until I was exhaling blood where the carbon dioxide should be. Then I coughed out all the glass and picked up a pocket of air that was hiding at the back of my closet. I swaddled it like a baby and kissed its forehead. As I did, the breath found its way back in.

My eyeliner wings were blacker and longer and the breath had a faint air of raspberries and happiness as it caressed the world around it.

via *

drinking shocktop on the hill

The raccoons fighting outside of my window sound like children being lowered into vats of boiling water and the sound of this song reminds me of your face in my hands. The indent you left on the pillow and the smell that rubbed its way along me as I curled into the sheets on your bed. Over shitty diner coffee you come alive for me and I feel sixteen again with your name on my lips. The tears never dried and the rip inside of my vocal cords has never healed quite right after all of those lonely nights screaming into my blankets.

I told you once what you did to me. I told you of the six year marathon I ran to get to you. I told you everything and no one stopped me, even though they knew it was meaningless. But at least you know. You know I loved you and you know what you were to me. You were golden days and painful nights. You were tears never wasted and the reason for years of sad poetry. You were a novel waiting to happen that people will read and see you as I did.

Once you said you'd loved twice in your life and that I was one of them. That was a pretty lie.

via *

home and abroad

I packed only the essentials,
laid them all out in front of me.
My tiny stuffed kitty, three nickels,
assorted lego pieces for protection,
fruit snacks shaped like sharks and monsters.
My small gummy worm fingers dropped
them into my baby blanket, yellow softness
and drenched in my smell.

I dashed to my dorm and threw

essentials into a plastic bag. 

Underwear, shirts, phone charger, baby blankets

still steeped in my smell, the tiny kitty too.

I had bruises etched into my collar bone

and was still bleeding between my thighs.

He'd had me for three months and no one knew.

The bundle was light and easy to

tie up on the broken stick I'd 

found in the yard. I was 

a 1930s runaway, ready to jump

into a boxcar and head to California.

I'd run to my aunt, the woman with

the same lips as me, the same

little rosebud smile and auroral eyes.

No one knew how his hand covered

my rosebud lips and stole the

glow from my eyes. No one

could see the Dahlia grin bleeding

its way to the surface of my cheeks

every time he touched me. 

It was time to run.

I slung the stick across my shoulder

and marched to the end of my driveway,

the orange September glow blazing.

Suddenly she called my name.

She started to smile as she walked to me 

but saw my determined brow and faltered.

Oh Emma, I'd never let you leave home, baby.

You'll always have my arms to hold.

I drove into the November chill and

called the woman whose arms 

were always there even

when I pushed away the most.

Three hours and I'm home, mom,

I'll need a hug when I arrive.

Oh Emma, I don't want you home.

I know what you've been doing and

you're not welcome here.

We sat in the family room and ate 

cherries until our fingers smiled red.

She unpacked my bag and

wrapped me in my baby blankets.

He was sitting in the dorm room

when the key jammed its way in the lock.

He sliced my bag from my hands.

He ripped my baby blankets. 

via *

injection

I missed him the way you miss Novocain after the dentist; I didn't miss how numb I felt, how odd my own tongue felt in my mouth. I didn't miss anticipating when the numbness would end. But I did miss the lack of pain. The ability to chew my cheeks to ribbons without feeling a thing.

There were days where nothing made sense but to lie in bed and let the power of him drown me, covering my head and running down my throat. It was in those chokingly silent moments that I'd feel his hands around my neck and around my chest, pressing the air out of me until I thought I was nothing more than an empty bag of bones waiting for this Frankenstein of a man to spark me with seeming life again.

But that love was a lie, a masquerade I created for myself out of whimsical girlish fantasies and vinegar lies that dripped from his incisors. The blades at the ends of his fingertips cut one time too deep and suddenly the numbness left and I snapped awake. People will tell you that being numb is better than feeling too much. But why would you choose a prison of paralysis when the kingdom of consciousness is trying to welcome you home?

via *

pour me a drink and pour your eyes over me.

You've always been the dangerous one. First I was your secret, your play thing, your high school taste. I was a risk you took, a risk to your cool factor, the image you'd molded of yourself as a bad boy, the streetwise one. If I was such a secret, doesn't that make me the dangerous one? I know you more than you'd like me to. But you never stayed away.

Your hair was always long, but even longer now. You moved closer to me and I breathed you in: the smoke, the liquor, the past. Fogged up windows, hushed breath, so much history. And years later I still feel your hands, the first hands. 

I was hazy quickly. You called it forward action, I called it liquid luck. I watched you from my booth, I pressed myself agains the wall, I let my eyes bubble up the length of my straw until I saw you looking back. 

That band is loud.

That band is shit.

That band gets better the more you drink.

You slid into my booth again and I slid my hand across your back, down your leg. Your hand found my thigh. Don't let them see. Maybe this isn't such a game after all. 

I'm told your eyes were on me when you sang. I know I was staring right at you. You were eating me alive. Everything burned, like guitar strings against calloused fingers. 

As we left, there you stood smoking. Or talking. It didn't matter. I grabbed your face. I kissed you like I knew I would. I couldn't even tell you why. 

I can only write about you with an elevated heart rate. With bass lines piercing the silence. When I dance in a dark room all alone. Maybe it's because I only feel you when my heart is racing and my nerve endings feel alive and tingling. You are the dangerous boy, after all. You make me feel dangerous. 

via *

echoes in the hallway

Voiceless echoes are coming for us.
They're crunching leaves and bones
against their molars and ripping jugulars
with their canines,
stabbing at the only flesh not burrowed
under dreams and blankets.

I can smell the sulfur. I can smell the heat.

Every waning fairytale on its last leg
hobbles back into the pages
and yet you stand. You. The unlit cigarette
hanging off of my lips, the funeral of smoke
strangling my uvula.

You hug me, the hole inches onward
toward six feet. A foot per year.
You loved me once.
You buried me forever.

via *

the long haired boy

The night of velvet and fractured glass
bled on for months. Who needed
sleep when you were on call for
a fire department of a boy's body.

The first night, sneaking through the garage
riddled with mannequins and the
promise of panting glowing on his cheekbones
as he led me through the dark
to the sheets, darker still-
swimming with his smell.

He touched me first. I shivered.
He gripped my hands. I exhaled.

My breathing struggled to synch
itself back with my heart,
the uneven pace of both in a relay race.
Breathing and beating elbow each other,
begging for first. Begging. Please.

All at once, breathing made sense again.
Fumbling turned to fluid for the first
time in my sixteen years;
a preview of nights to come,
years after the house was sold and
the mannequins were dressed and undressed
time and time again.

via *

i am nothing without pretend

It's amazing how crushing you still feel on top of me,

even if it really was only once that your body weight

pressed into mine, made mine
 inconsequential.

This was the real first time, with love

and all that. A dorm room, plastered with childhood

and that beer pong smell. I only smelt turquoise and 

baby teeth.

We were babies swinging from monkey bars,
hanging by our chests and swinging
from our middles, eyes locking on
different points.

Fumbling for what was trying to come naturally, but
only as time wore onward would
we learn was only natural for
 one of us.

Even when we reached connection, you
pushed as deep as a needle inside of me,
my arms gave out from under me and
you faltered.

We moved independently together,
moths circling the same flame before death,
my right wing caught fire first, your left
burning just as quickly.

I still have burns and scars on my arm,
blisters and boils grow where they touch me.
Staying alone lets me stay with you, pretending
you wanted me. 

Via *

Inspired by:

remembrance and morphine

I'm not ready to write him.
Not ready to let him come
back to life.
I don't want to remember the good.
I don't want to relive the bad.
If I don't cry about it soon,
tears will have to start seeping
from every pore
and fall from my lashes like
snowflakes blown off of telephone wires,
buzzing, alive, alone.

I miss the beautiful destruction.
I miss throwing myself onto
hot coals for another human being.
Feeling another's glowing embers
embedded into my flesh,
eating it away.

But I do not miss any of them.
I don't miss the first one I loved,
his turquoise smell or loaded kisses.
I don't miss the second,
his day-old scruff and deceit.
I don't miss the third,
lovely and loving and lost.

Even though I don't miss them,
there are some I cannot bring
myself to write.
Still too fresh, still too bright,
still too real and sharp.
The pen has turned into an IV,
and it's full of remembrance
instead of morphine.

via *

prologue

More Thom and Piper today. This is the prologue to their story. Enjoy, lovelies.

I spot him the moment he walks in to the room, his Gatsby smile as bright as ever. His eyes scan the room, barely resting on one face for longer than a moment before moving to the next one. Until his eyes find mine. His charming smile becomes smaller, sincere, the corners of his eyes crinkling with memory and time. I return the smile and raise my hand in a wave, bringing my hand back on to my heart. His hand finds his heart too as he offers a small bow in my direction. I chuckle and hold his gaze until someone grabs his arm, pulling him into a noisy conversation about his latest achievement. 

A small infinity had passed between us, a roller coaster spanning years. Although much had changed, I was still seventeen when he looked at me, nervous and loving- an old friend who had been there through it all. Although the love had changed and shifted, the tiny string still held us together. And as he continued his conversation with another old friend, I watched him talk, watched him work the room. The piece of hair still stuck up defiantly from the back of his head. I knew he would be livid when he glanced in a reflective surface to find his hair out of place. 

I’m glad it is over. I am glad I have moved on. I am also glad that there is still a tiny ache in my heart when I see him. That ache is pure and real. I earned that ache.

via *

repeat

I'm sorry I cannot quiet your mind
like the lies screaming from the
box before your bed.
I'm sorry the channel flipping
silences your past
while my face wakes up
the past you never wanted.
I only wanted to be heard
and you wanted to be alone.
Who do I choose to care for?
You or me?
People ask me if I want children.
I've already raised myself,
And cannot repeat the process.
I'm not angry. Or Bitter.
I find power in independence.
I just wish I didn't have to.

via *

three worlds

Right now my head is inhabiting three very different worlds simultaneously, all coming together in the strangest connected web. That connection tells me that fate is playing a little waiting game with me, a cruel game of keep away. Not cruel in the usual sense. Not a mocking cruelty. More like a cruelty that is teaching me patience, the meaning of following your heart, the meaning of resilience and diligence, the meaning of what it feels like to see it all coming together right in front of you, just out of reach.

World one is the present. I'm here, coasting along. The present is the blank canvas. It's there, there isn't much going on, but it is there and ready to burst with potential.

World two is the past. This is the defiant splash of red paint that seeps deep into the canvas and gives it life and breath. It's all of the little coincidences that is making my world come together and keeps hinting at a future that I am more than ready for. Over the past few weeks, little bits and pieces of life have been reappearing in front of me that eerily connect to things that were happening at the same time last year at this time. An old friend who I had dinner with on the night of a very tender memory contacted me yesterday after I spent all day planning to contact him. Eery fate. A group of customers who used to frequent my cafe, who then ended up being jerks and disappeared, have began reappearing at their little corner table. Weird fate. That late night lonely feeling has crept back in. The kind that can only be quenched with either a Netflix binge accompanied by a late night cheeseburger or staying up rereading the darkly sexy passages of Lolita. Fate is toying with me and watching me squirm. The suspense is killing me, darling fate.

The puzzle pieces are all laid next to each other, they just need a little urging to get them connected in the right way.

World three is the imminent future. It's destiny and it's hope. It's the moment when you step back from the Monet to see the full picture pixelating together before your eyes. It's the moment you can feel coming in your heart long before your brain gets the memo.

I can feel you in my bones. I feel you in my soul. The wait is long and lonely. I know that the three worlds run on my ability to over think and over analyze. I know these are dangerous and if my ability to over analyze and over think could power the world, we would have an energy overload and no need for fossil fuels. But analysis and deep thought make me feel powerful and dangerous. And feeling dangerous makes me feel you.

via *

midnight musings II

-I feel paralyzed when I write sometimes and I'm not entirely sold on what I've written. I realize first drafts can't be perfect.

-This scares me. I'm a perfectionist. It scares me when my words aren't perfect.

-You know what helps? Music. 

-Cliches are cliches for a reason. They are true.

-Without music, I believe, we would all feel paralyzed. 

-We would feel lost.

-We wouldn't breathe.

-All we can do is keep breathing

-I hope everyone has something they can love like I love words.

-I hope everyone has a celebrity they can look up to. Or if not a celebrity, someone with influence. 

-Pop culture is a part of us. It's time to accept that.

-Ever let your past come back at 12:05 and keep you up at night? 

-Sometimes it's nice to sit and think the past through.

-Even past that is re-imagined is true to you. It becomes your history. 

-I love personal histories

-I am a collector of lives.

-I want to hear every single story.

via Tumblr

september orange

A gasp of sunlight pulls through

the September orange coating the walls,

curling with the winds and rains

of an approaching storm.

The eloquence of your heartbeat

grows stifled and changed,

enumerating your fears,

encapsulating them,

dragging you down.

A moment of grace deflowered by regret.

A breath of tomorrow exhaled by desire,

inhaled by reality.

Em

via Tumblr