clearlyblue

When I was eight I hated summer It was juice-box sticky and every day I scraped myself off my sheets and poured my body into a glass. At twenty-two, I don't remember peeling my legs off a wooden chair come June, but how our hands were damp with nerves when we held them, how the AC on the bus was too much so my scarf became your blanket and we ate curry with my parents before I fell asleep on your shoulder. Or when you told me not to swim too far out and the ocean was too cold, how you got sunburned and I bit my tongue so hard holding back "I told you so" that I swear I bled, your eyes reflecting the fish at the aquarium, how you teased

Tonight I'm going to stop you on the porch, we'll stand toe to toe the way we used to when the pulse that thrummed quick and strong through our veins sang out our young, unbridled hope. Our eyes will meet and, just like the first time, I'll take a moment to run my fingers through your shining thoughts and caress the sharp lines of your mind. I'll lean forward and press my lips onto the the flower-petal curve of your self-expression, and that will be enough for you to take me by the hand and lead me up the stairs. In the soft moonlight that filters through the trees and our gauzy curtains I'll unbutton your fears and slip them

Sometimes, love is a violent thing --             first expanding as a supernova             and burning everything it reaches             then imploding into a black hole             and extinguishing everything it absorbs

who around is woven into madness? we don't vanish, we abscond. we're the gnash of heathen song against the pulpit; we are terror undeserved. we are wrath. red as war, enacting torture, dripping fashionably crimson. not a symptom, we're the cause. we are lawless rapture. tension when we glare, daring anyone to mention us. be wary of entrusting this dimension with your life. brandished just like knives embledded, bid us sever deeper. lend etiolating skin to court the reaper. rash of you challenge chaos, cast your feeble eyes upon the form of vast decay. your grasp upon reality indubitably worthless. taste dismay and full excruciating purge.

today i speak fluently in apologies they leap from my tongue so naturally i speak the word "sorry" like it is an endearing term like i'm kissing you better, like i'm bandaging the wound i caused even if it's just a papercut or nothing at all. i am saturated with these apologies and no matter how hard i scrub my skin they do not come out i am weighed down with them, i reek with the stench of confessions to crimes i did not commit. i am stained with this illusion of inferiority that i have spilled all over myself thinking maybe it was the right thing to do thinking i was destined to be everybody's secretary, everybody's subordinate just a klu

Your family tree simply grew this way. Your mother’s tongue cut throats as well as stone walls, but it never reached your skin. You considered this a blessing, failing to account for the million praises you never heard. Since the moment you were born, she struggled to separate your face from her morning coffee. She lived in a slow blur and you were an alert inconvenience. Nearly every morning she faded through the kitchen and living room, reciting old sorrows to herself while you wondered what you had done to confuse her. Sometimes she remembered to kiss you goodnight. Other times she pretended you didn’t exist when you cried fo

i lingered in my mother's belly like a hunger five days after i was due to make my grand appearance. it's almost as if i was hesitant to leave the womb, to break upon this empty sky as dawns do, spill my colors like glowstick syrup on this bleak world, or maybe, let the world spill its bleakness onto my beauty a newborn baby wrapped in cotton and swaddled in fate as i grew older, i witnessed the other kids losing their baby teeth and i wanted nothing to do with it i let my teeth dangle like christmas ornaments hanging by threads, didn't want to sever the ties i had to the past the first food i ate went past these very teeth they erupted fr

cityscape and roses, she's not a chain-smoker but she breathes in gulps, she breathes oxygen chains. she's aesthetic folded into leather jackets and eyes shadowed by rebellion. she won't stain her liver with vodka or beer, she drinks diet mountain dew in large swallows like birds slipping down a throat, but feathered sins are twice as beautiful, darling. [you're no good for me.] we sit on the bonnet of your vintage car from the 70s, you tell me, and I smile letting my feet slide over the dashboard. girl, we are hipster glory and rhododendron fury you crown my head with wreaths of flowers red like your retro lipstick, scarlet like my soul [d

2:45 am: Depression finds me with flickering eyes and aching wrists and it pulls back the covers of my bed, sitting on the edge of my mattress with hands folded in its lap just like my mother when she wanted to talk. It stares at me, tight lipped, a question in the air between us and I breathe it in, blinking salt veined eyes, then concede with a nod. 12:15 pm: Depression greets me with my head buried in my pillows and its hand against my hair telling me to go back to sleep so I curl into the refuge of my blankets while the clock on my bedstand ticks another few hours off my life. 6:00 pm: Depression sneaks up on me as I stare at the food

You mustn't forget that poetry is not obscure words and fancified circumstances thinly married and filthy with pretension-- it is familiar words and those moments we've all lived bonded and twisted together-- the strands of a bracelet (or the plait of your hair), bled into a cohesive whole following the curve of your veins.