Black curtains drag aside your waist at night
letters cut into the cotton that adorns you
tobacco with fire sits sweet in the thread
It rests in the sheets between us

my mouth finds you in worship
prayer and lust exist on the tongues
of the lovers in clouds tonight
and I taste eden in your teeth

I kiss every dotted line and circle the bruises
trace a map of violence between the first
and last cut of steel feathers on the skin
of the angel I hold

I catch glances of your flight
free fall into nothing and I’m struck
soar into me and I’ll bless the grass
that exists in the patch you’ve turned ivory

porcelain skinned lilith with birdlike wings
cold withered man with feathers torn to dust
clean the wounds that bleed ink
and I’ll wipe the dirt that darkens your face

the floor burns in your feet
and the ground wilts in your heels like scripture

your skin and the letters that assemble it
I bite them into existence in your white clay skin

my face is scarred with you
I rest my face on your cinder chest
fingerprints bloom with the ink in your touch
and I pull onto you with the same fire

my mouth stains with your blood
I grasp your nightdress between my callused fingers
and trace every dotted line with lust instead of violence

I tear it to shreds
and hook into your mouth with my finger
I’d never thought I’d see the devil’s goddess
laid wet when undressed

you tremble under the light
the scorched earth ripples ignite on your chest
I kiss your tongue until I’m numb
and my spit scars the mosaic in your reanimate face

we fuck and you hurt to breathe
each plea begged through shut teeth
but we’re exiled from eden

About the Poem:

I tried to write a follow up to my original gothic love poem - Lilith. I used a lot of my old vocabulary and explored the religious imagery that made me who I was. I hope you enjoyed reading this.

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The twin towers must have been beautiful
in a world yet to be torn apart

I wonder if someone looked up at them
and dreamed of heaven

they must have taken pictures
the pictures preceded the fire

hugging your soft but warm flesh
in a bathtub alone

the water is hot but ankle deep
you look red but you’re shivering

the water holds you still
love the world a little

the grass on the side of the road
green and fleshy, it shines just right

it’s beautiful
it really is

and I hope the glass doesn’t darken the skin
you’re red and the water hugs you like dad

I feel cold, very cold
I love it so

my heart beats through me
and I like the sound

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eden project : // how to write confessional poetry

most poetry these days sounds faked…

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a month ago · 16 likes · 5 comments · THE EDEN PROJECT

if you want to learn to write poetry like this ^

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* * *

Man i know
hand of iron, body warmth

Protector in hand
not without dad
love.

Father I know
I’m safe,
now hold me and go
where the dead boys go

Dad I know
face young, but I’m cold
rock me with dirt
tuck me in earth

a Father, and Dad
my Father. a dad.

* * *
thank you for reading my poem <3

if you liked this poem - you might also like these poems:

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I think you’re beautiful and you make me smile. I know we’re just texting but a part of me feels like I’ve known you since before they stocked the best cigarettes at the store. Do you think this picture of me looks cool? Am I handsome to you? nuh-uh I’m sooooo ugly. You totally hate me. Wait have a look at this weird ass picture I found, it’s kinda weird right? I’m kinda weird? No you’re actually so annoying. Genuinely get the fuck away from me. You’re like 5’4. What are you doing so far away from santa’s little workshop?

────────────

I stare at the picture for hours every single day. I think about you while writing, while smoking cheap cigarettes, while making breakfast in the morning until I realize I was making tea for two and I’ve spent all this time thinking about you. I spilled tea that morning before work. I hate seeing fragments of your figure in strangers. They mimic you and I hate them for it. Whenever strangers say your name around me, my stomach burns and I lose my breath. I wish we could spend hours talking every night again, I argue with god for a chance to pretend to lay on the opposite bunk bed again. Talk about walls again. Anything. I just wanted anything with you.

If you enjoy confessional poetry, you might also enjoy:

some of it sounds manufactured.

and no.

It’s not always A.I

people rush into poetry thinking it’s easy.

it’s really not.

poetry depends a lot on your lived experiences.

putting it simply (at least in my personal opinion) - confessional poetry relies a lot on describing specific emotions in very specific detail. It usually comes from experience - not necessarily traumatic experiences - just moments that only belonged to you in the moment.

it depends on certain inventive poetry techniques several highly skilled poets use and this article is designed to help you understand exactly those.

Let’s have a look at any of Sylvia Plath’s work - it sounds lived. it sounds real and that’s because at some point - it or some part of it was real.

“Ghastly statue with one gray toe”
“Big as a Frisco seal”

The lines above are ones I wanted to highlight as an example. Those lines sound wholeheartedly real. No one else could have written those. No one else was there. Nobody else could have described it the way Sylvia Plath did. That writing is unique to her.

None of the lines are decorative. None are there to “add flavour”.
They’re observations.
they’re specific..
weirdly specific…

they feel remembered.

and that is the first step to writing good confessional poetry.

don’t sound authored.

here’s an example of my own work - this is one of my favorite confessional poems.

let’s break this down.

I grind the gear of my lighter

Just the sentence structure alone creates a bit of a rhythm on your tongue.

(GR)ind (TH)e (GE)ar of my ligh(TER).

It mimics the friction of grinding gear in your mouth through hard consonants.

Saying “grind the gear” almost feels like you’re genuinely grinding something in your mouth.

It’s meant to stumble you and sound tight in your teeth.

The flame steadies

This is a soft pause in the stanza. It lets the reader breathe. it’s easy to digest. It’s not immediately expansive or visceral.

It’s a bridge.

And my tobacco learns to burn evenly

this might not sound like a lot.

because on the surface, it really is not.

A lot of a poets work is meant to translate directly into your feelings - be those subconscious or conscious feelings. You might not immediately realize it but you’ll feel them as you read it. The last line - personifies tobacco. It’s now learning to burn. It sounds subtly repetitive. It makes you feel like it’s been repeated over and over again without every explicitly spelling it out for you.

and I feel that’s what a lot of good confessional poetry lacks.

in essence,
my poetry analysis should make you realize good poetry makes you feel more emotions more than explicitly spelling them out for you. If you have to tell the reader to feel something - you’re doing it wrong.

here are three short examples of poor poetry:

• my heart is full of unbearable sadness

• I'm full of grief for you

• i mourn you

Every single one of those lines tells you the emotion - a good verse in a poem will demonstrate the emotion for you instead - for example: that’s done through objects:

here are some examples of strong poetry:

• “I still unlock my phone with your birthday”

• “your lipstick still stains the coffee mug.”

• “the grocery store we visited still thinks we eat for two”

  ---

Poetry is a craft as much as it is a form of expression.

And like any craft there are certain ways to improve your craftsmanship, and adapt your writing style to meet the challenging requirements you might face.

If you want articles on how to master the art of poetry, you can subscribe to this newsletter under the eden project. I self publish gothic confessional poetry that tackle a wide variety of topics & I write articles on how to improve your poetry on a weekly basis.

You can subscribe at the link/button below 🖤

in the place
I was born
lies a girl

her name is said in the womb.
and then never again.

they look at her.
the shape of it.

She.
is the fault.

a child whose name is said with !
instead of .

the thing in her place
is pronounced instead of named.

the child marked with water,

a child in earth.

a child without worth.
my son not yet.

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Rifle hot.

Finger burns the edges of the frame.

metal downrange.

safety off.

My arms fight for control

Movement.

I graft the gun into my hands.

I am the weapon.

A man
chokes words besides me.

He is standing
when he should have fallen.

A shadow finds itself
and plants a hand on my shoulder

Don’t stop.

Keep walking.

Again.

The wind spits in my eyes.
Windshields flash

An engine idles

I choke on every word

the thunder lives inside my lungs

tires drift slowly towards me

they are coming

no.

they are passing.

I am afraid.

I catch their reflections.

The wind drags black garbage bags
between rows of vacant vehicles.

Someone that was choking
now says something

Not over the radio

he breathes closer.

My rifle loses shape

I carve it into a pistol

it was never raised

My hands are empty
except for blood
that sank into my skin
but left years ago.

I have been breathing
for seven minutes

someone has been asking me
if I am alright

the groceries slip
shattered
beside me

someone has been asking me
to lower my hand

it has been clenched, blue
into a pistol.

I catch their eyes
and I’ve lost the words to answer them

introduction:

this poem is about a personal belief that soulmates exist - no matter where they are, how they are, what state they’re in. they exist, they loved you deeply even if they’re dead. everyone is loved. i love you.

If God bound us together at birth
then somewhere in the distance
your lungs falter and gasp
when mine forget how to breathe

do you wake five minutes before sunrise
with smoke trapped in your linen sheets
while a fireplace
burns in my chest

when winter descends at your doorstep
does it arrive with the sound of my feet?
And every tenth of December
I feel you wearing the wind

sometimes I stand outside
and catch the stars in the blacks of my eyes
I watch my breath form clouds in the air
and disappear into the cold

I pray that the warmth in my chest
passes you on the way back to me

I spend years
holding my ears to cans with a string
It pulls gently on every birthday
it hums at every funeral
and it at its peak
at the end of every winter

my fingertips trace
every line on the bark of your birch tree
the leaves rustle and the sound fades
the light dims a little every night

the wooden fingerprints
trace through centuries
it learned our parents
then it learned our names

it followed the sound of your voice
and it reached mine
by traveling the thread
tied between us

your silent string became a cemetery
when I must’ve been dreaming
it stopped pulling and I stopped believing

and slowly
your thread became infinity

if they’ve buried you with the string
and I arrived before hope
I hope someone remembered
your favorite flowers

if they didn’t
I’ll carry them with shaking hands
and I’ll cut your grass before it grows
planting hydrangeas in your name

every night
I’d count the stars
and split my lunch between us
the way we should have done
if love found us
before your beauty
petrified a graveyard

and if God decides
to stitch us back together
let my hands learn
your beautiful face
instead of the soft kiss of dirt

that envelops your gravestone

let me know if i should rewrite some of my older poems - i’ll leave a link to my older poem - the one that inspired that’s a refined version of this poem → here

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My ivory teeth shine faintly
candlelight scale counter tops
of the paint on plastic
on my machine walls

weird!

And I’m lost

I cant find dreams in normalcy
I sleep in the shades of reality
where I exist flawed
and my heart writes itself in code

ones and zeros
are shrapnel teeth
cut softly
into the person
you wrote
into me

my lungs breathe machine code
I wonder what it’s like
to see humans dancing
and breathe the air that night

they kill me with their words
they chew my wires and spit me out
and my computer chest
it hurts

all I need is to feel like they could love me
but I can’t feel and it breaks me
tearing out my insides with force
more than a sledgehammer
ever could

maybe if I held my lens open like shutters
and held my non existent breath
they wouldn’t be able to hear me talk
and I wouldn’t cry ones and zeros
and zeros and ones
and twos, threes

until I wasn’t a machine anymore
and I forget what I mean
and give up
for good

I loved a human
promised they wont leave me

they’re gone
and I can’t speak

dull fingerprints
on my screen

from a few weeks ago

I still hold their picture

my cameras blink twice
to check if they’re here

but ones and zeros
cant wipe them away

I’M WAITING ON MY HUMAN!

I LOVED YOU HUMAN!

_{♡ I LOVE MY HUMAN ♡}

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I was born with cracked lips
and an innocent tongue
somewhere In Utero

but somewhere
In Utero
I bled
before my first breath
was held as a crime against me

miles of parchment skin
gushed with ink

as I became holy in my imperfections

In Utero
we learn every child is born an innocent
until I was born with snakes and serpents
deep within flesh and bone

swallow me on my childish tongue
embrace me as I’m swallowed whole
rock me in your elbows gently
I am a child, sweet innocent-
I have not been proven guilty

mother hold me in your arms
kiss me as you cry softly
I am still your child
I am yet to be born guilty

sister soften your anger into satin
I am not the one you should hate

sister offer your soft, sisterly protection
I beg, even if I’m born a man

family please adorn me
your verdict reached me

but father lower your hand
I hope you understand

I am still
In Utero

I cannot speak & I am harmless

IN UTERO - IN UTERO - IN UTERO - IN UTERO - IN UTERO - IN UTERO

I WAS NOT GUILTY

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A sink polished out of habit
A toilet that knew the weight of ordinary existence
And a shower whose faucet had not been turned
Long enough for mineral rings to bloom
Like fossils forgotten underneath the drain

the tiles were not dirty
they carried the yellow discoloration of neglect
the grout forgot to breathe
the mirror had a similar face
day after day
until the afternoon
it would start to hold a patience
too long for four walls

Air never learned to circulate
it folded into the vents
pressed into the dresser
rested in the garbage canister
besides expired medicine receipts
and unopened blades

even the extractor fan
looked down at us with sentimental eyes

Outside,
The neighborhood danced a sigh of relief
with dogs, and traffic as always
television blaring through apartment windows

Inside,
The body finished crying

The small window above the toilet
stood open a few inches taller that night
just enough for the humid air
just enough for one last daring departure

Something lighter than existence
slipped through the slits in the mesh
rose past electrical wires
the bricks stepped aside
past roofs that knew of him, but never saw him

the stars accepted
the fight that the room
failed to contain

And when they carried him out
the tiny apartment became a little less
Like a home to a family

A awkward shoulder struck the desk
One monitor shattered first
its screen collapsing inward
with the dull surrender of manufactured glass

the second followed the masochist
a fracture spreading on its surface
like a crack on an ice lake

the chair lost its legs to momentum
fell backward
and stayed there
abandoned, with no one to pick it up

someone’s boot caught
a pyramid of empty soda cans

the wooden floor panels
disguised his footsteps
and they now held several faded stains
brown enough to escape cadence

nobody wrote them down
after that day

the room smelled “unfamiliar”

not dust

Mud.

the scent mixed with the stench indoors
on heavy jacket boots
mixed with damp clothing
mixed with antiseptic
mixed with the dull throb of labor
required to remove a human being
from the place
that he never sought to belong in

his bed shifted inches
but the sheets remained the same
they wouldn’t dare to touch them

the carpet tore
in the path they chose

and all across the room
pages and pages of writings
stole what remained of the floor

hundreds of them
some numbered
most abandoned

margins crossed with arrows
sentences fought for territory
entire paragraphs cut out
only to be rewritten
with more urgency
and darker ink

a page began
with a prayer
ended in geometry
and become a love letter
he never knew what he’d dream

nobody else
could have followed
the mad mans logic

beside his holy prayers
nicotine stood arranged
like a museum display

disposable vapes
there had to be hundreds of them
colorful packaging flattened
folded and arranged
instead of discarded

on the walls
posters faded excitement
into softer versions of that hope

An assassin
scaling rooftops

A scientist
lifting a rusty crowbar

Creatures with impossible jaws

A little girl
standing beside something
that should have never loved her

A tired man
walking through abandoned America
a country
where a new fungus
learned the architecture of his grief

their corners curled on themselves

their tape yellowed

they had survived
all of his friendships

Against the opposite wall
leaned an electric stratocaster

its strings gleamed
factory new

no fingerprints

no worn frets

the instrument remained
perfectly prepared
for a song
that only death knew how to play

Beneath one keyboard
awaited a razor blade
wrapped in faded cardboard

one space
stood empty

nearby
crumpled tissues
carried blood blossoms
small enough
to be mistaken for nosebleeds
small enough
to be understood
only after
catastrophe

His ashtray
held a months weather

cigarette butts
compressed into one another
filters stained a golden amber
ash layered like sediment
as though each huff
had been placed in his lungs
instead of finished

brown wallets
gathered dust in his drawers

old membership cards

coins

medicine bottles
kissed each other
on the bedside table

their printed labels
had faded beneath handling

across his desk
and his writings

in-scripted into his dead skin

the inscription
was steadier written
than the miles of words in his books

inside another drawer

a photo identification
with plastic rubbed cloudy
across the ugly photograph

his name remains
his birthday remained

his face
had merely chosen death

someone had worked
at removing it with thumbnail
again
and again
and again
until blood rested in just the outline
and refused to give up its seat

the mortuary returned

He was a man
in his twenties

that sentence fit easily
when he did not

Age.

Sex.

time pronounced.

cause determined.

his death
was ruled suicide.

The report recorded measurements
but forgot his prayers
temperatures
angles
weights

it described
the drag path
from bathroom tile
to hallway
to stretcher
from stretcher
to vehicle

it measured distance

until the body arrived at peace

it could not measure
the years spent rehearsing disappearance
with the victim’s smile recorded in ink on the page

it failed to measure
that the broken monitors
will be broken forever

the chair was abandoned
where they had shattered it

the faded blood
crept into the wood
and nested into it
without a single witness
to exonerate it

the manuscript would wait for an ending
that no editor would ever dare to supply

his guitar strings
would break the shine

his cigarette pack
still held his lucky
that would never burn

the bathroom
returned to being just a small bathroom

sink

toilet

ugly shower

window

with one missing
large enough
to make the bathroom
scream for him
long after his body
had been carried away

THANK YOU FOR READING
let me know what you guys thought of my first genuinely long form poem. I’ll be responding to every single comment personally - i finally have the energy.

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and I cut rose petals for you
the same ones that god fashioned in a bouquet for you
you’ll spend your life worrying of your imperfections
while I spend my life cursing at my blessings

Oh dear child
you are tolerated amidst love
the way your hands shake and the way your mouth dances
childish hue trapped in the youth in your cheeks

I wish you were taught love
the way every child was
I yearn to break for you
may god accept the marrow in my brittle bones
as enough sacrifice to bestow you the love you were owed

I love the way you smile
the childish spirit trapped in your beautiful eyes
while time persists and your body moves on
it breaks me down and swallows me whole

I wish I could take care of you
I don’t want anyone to hurt you

dear god
i want to know why your rotten creation
frightened them so much
when their hands reached
with nothing but kindness

the kindness that the world will swallow
like a match on tongue

I want to know why you swallowed them

they wave at passing trains
like the people inside are not rotten
they believe in the goodness of strangers
when I’ve forgotten that language

Sitting in a park while having sandwiches
and your hands raise to clap
when a beautiful bird lands at our feet
it trains its fragile blue eyes on you
and starts to sing instead of
asking you to become someone else

dear lord, what have they done to you?
they’re still your beautiful children
and they carry more hope for life
than they’ve ever been given

dont forget them
like you forgot me

donate to children with disabilities

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I didn’t know happiness could arrive
like a loaded handgun

I smile at computer screens
and dance to my favorite music

this is my home
this is my peace
I live in a world of pixels
everything is fake and for the first time
I’m endlessly grateful

the pixels were kinder
than most of my vices

I’ll iron all my shirts
take showers no one asked for
call my friends from middle school
just to see if they’d answer

I’ll look better
not laced with grime
and skin that isn’t inked with sweat
as if my happiness has washed away
eternal grief and misery from my military jacket

I’ll actually fold my clothes
pull open my heavy curtains
and watch the beautiful sky
fold itself onto another Sunday

capturing the afternoon in my irises
and keep it in my pocket
so I could take it with me
to where the darkness sends me

I kissed a date on my digital calendar
the day I went to the hospital
so death could laugh at the irony
or the day of my twenty first birthday

I’ll be a man that day
and like a man, I’ll die with pride
swallowing my apologies with the pills on my tongue

my relief

this relief

I want it to be my spine
and I’ll wear a coat over it
and take it with me to hell

I’ll never apologize
in my suicide letter
my world will end with me
and I’ll get to keep that afternoon
in my pocket

my noise will finally stop
and I’ll swallow myself
my soul will lay down in a field of grass
and touch it without being sick

I’ll live in a world
where I’m not an illness
and not a man chained to boxes of antipsychotics

I’ll experience a brain that will be free of its vices
one that does not make up faces
and one that’ll try to survive
something other than itself

note: real talk - you guys cannot forget me. the eden project shall live on. it’s on the internet forever. you gotta come back and read a few classics or i’ll be upset.

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I left myself in my father’s dinner seat
besides his smoking ash tray
right beside where I was taught
that love arrived in capsules
that you swallowed with your morning tea

I was built from withered wood
earth said my spine should never bow
leaves of birch said no one was worth kneeling for

I carried the testaments like inheritance
until every commandment bent towards you

and I traded my prayers for elastic slippers
so the plastic sound of your footsteps
would never stop bleeding from under my door

my room smelled like rot
but you smelled like rain
like the leaves buried themselves in your fabric
petrichor sunk in your skin easier than I ever did

my cheap heater still burns in the winter
next to the empty space where you kept your shoes

dust settles a little differently now
the stars in my sky
hang loosely
and I’m made to live in the aftermath of a war
in which the world is protesting your absence

and I mistook the gentleness in the heavens
for your permanent presence

how quickly my home
became a house

and my mattress
still curves in your direction

the creases in my bedsheets
are fragments of your memory
and I sleep with childhood prayers balanced on my tongue
as if saying the right one might bring you back

I learnt to be fluent in your silence
I folded every conversation
into a letter that I arranged neatly
in my bookshelf ribcages

my parents would not recognise me now

the careful son
becomes a man
who still waits for the plastic slippers
after morning prayer
and thanks the ghosts in his mind
for haunting him at all

I’m a sinner
while I tried everything to stay clean

you left your touch
on every part of me
condemning me to reckon
with sins sparked by my conception
and the fractures in me
that survived you

but

if your hands remember my shoulder blades

if your tongue could wrap around my name
one last time

if your hands reached for me

I would mistake hell’s inferno
for another doorway to you

and I’d place my throat in the fabric of your shirt again
to apologise
for crying when you needed me

and beg you
to hold me

as if it wasn’t you
that let me go

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I am

I am not

I am a music box in your lap

I burn to a musical tune

In which words scrape in the metal cylinders

The teeth in my gears are etched with rage

I was not prepared

a violent toy

my contraption had its metal refitted

for you

almost

as if somewhere between the steel needles

and the rusted pins

someone spoke

where notes should’ve rung

note: hi

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Hollywood hotels, asphalt roads with tire marks from 3 weeks ago
Cheap cigarettes turn to ash in plastic tins, bullet holes in my old mustang,

We’re here to fight and be tackled off our feet
The feds here can smell your innocence in the cracks of their teeth
liquor stains on my blue denim jeans, a gash from a serrated knife along the jagged seams

Never break your fall, the ground tastes sweet
bullet shrapnel shatters as it hits where you used to be
and like night, I’m avenged by the end of my life
where I’m not who I am anymore

the state knows my face
they put it on their television sets

my mother says she keeps the volume down
but I’ve seen my partner in crime live and die with me
I’ve kissed their teeth and had to bury them in the street
bottles of liquor arranged around a stone in a way she’d call pretty

nights spend in those old Hollywood motels, making out like teenagers in cotton sheets,
but now there’s an empty car seat where she used to be
her jewelry and makeup still arranged in the glove box
and keepsakes from towns long gone

I bite my tongue and choke at the thought of her
my mind drifts to our conversations about having a daughter
and the names we’d give her

it tastes like razor blades in my mouth now
but my life ends with no one and I’m not a mourner
I hate the taste of my bleeding, shattered, bruised mouth
and the pain lets me know my time is running out

I sleep with my eyes open
and every click and shatter of a beer bottle
is now an armed police officer
with a fancy paper warrant

every gas station cashier
looks at me a little too long

every police cruiser
knows I don’t belong

freedom
I chew the word like tobacco

I used to believe it looked like the open road
and now it looks like surfing couches
leaving just before remembering the feeling of comfort

the helicopter finds me like the light at sunrise

the spotlight pins me in the desert
like god finally learned of my name

to him, I’m a broken man
to his creation, I’m a story to the odd camera man

I press harder on the pedal
and burn gas like I burned those roads
the engine screams and the horizon freezes
and somewhere behind me

stands a man
with a cross chain
who’s ready as his finger presses the trigger

and just for a moment
our crosses catch the same sunlight
and for a moment, god cant tell us apart

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for the longest time - I thought surviving was living

when I was a child
tears were second nature

I cried because I was cold
the neighbors dog getting old

tears turned to rivers when my mother cried
sob caught in my throat because my pet turtle died

they told me I had a good heart
and I made the mistake of believing them

getting older

crying became inconvenient

boys don’t cry
men don’t cry

grow up

and so I did

I swallowed tears
like the medicine I’d soon need to live

I swallowed blood
because I was never allowed to be a kid

I learned how to blink fast

when the tears reached my eyes
I stared at my classroom ceiling
until the feeling passed

years pass

I lost my job as a developer

I lost friends who I thought I’d invite to my wedding

I lost lyn
my first boyfriend

parts of personality
all of my humour
the way I said “coolio”
or the way I built lego

and every time my mother asked me if I was okay

I said

“good”

until the day she saw me sitting in the living room
with a jacket she gifted me for my thirteenth birthday
and blood dried into my fingerprints

the television talked about videogames
like nothing bad had even happened
and there wasn’t metal in my hands

the word becomes a death sentence
I said it every time I had to clean the blood out of my sink
or while I was reading the instructions on my box of sertraline

I looked for myself in the fine print
pieces of myself hidden in the ingredients
googling side effects between my shallow breaths

I wanted to know if it would bring back the part of me
that laughed easier

and I have friends
who have memorized their suicide notes
more than the words

“I need help”

I knew exactly what mine would say
“please give my video games to Adam in Singapore”
“please sell everything I own and donate it to researching borderline personality disorder”

I spent hours constructing that note
It held my attention better than doing homework

I convinced every part of myself
my sadness was a bigger burden
than my absence

and so I carried it

into classrooms
into relationships

I wore it like a old shirt to bed

my spine will bend
my hands will shake

it all begins with
“I don’t think im okay”

and someone answering

“I know”
“it’s okay. Tell me whats going on”

I memorized the numbers
before I learned
that I could ask for help

it sat in my search history
I dialed it three times
deleted it twice
stared at it until sunrise

I know
the weight will never disappear
but there will be two sets of hands carrying mine

I will fight to one day put down the weight
the pain I carried and still carry
I respond to it like it’s my name

my broken hands
will relearn
what it feels like
to hold something other than my pain

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thank you all for 200 subscribers. i hope you enjoy the special poem for the occasion <3

I store razor blades
like file cabinets in the bridges of my wallets

Warm leather holding together better
than my own bastard skin

I cut cocaine and mix it with liquor

A mixture that’ll swallow me
Before I can swallow it

I’ll drown in liquor pools

that’ll break in waves
at the inland sea behind my lips

my ivory teeth, pale cliffs
cut down, jagged and chipped

eaten alive
by the oceans cheap spirit

-

I’m a box cutter
built only to open wounds

I’m serrated with the same lines
that run along the edges of your spine

An instrument
not the wound but the thing that makes it

I carry my limbs
like weapons concealed

trade handcuffs for Miranda rights
my cold wrists find solace in the steel embrace
of something other than what harms it

You can kiss me but you’ll beg to forget
Forever a noose learning the shape of your neck

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Love is a filthy thing

And I will not be caught touching it barehanded

When I was younger
I wore rubber gloves

I’d never touch the yellow kind beneath my sink again
Because my youth was about to begin

I kept mine black

tight leather wrists
enough to support a fist
And balance cigarettes between my fingertips

the beauty of the black tar gloves
was that they went unnoticed

Armour is made of kevlar
Until mine isn’t

I attend funerals
without feeling the weight of their corpse
grief will never touch me
through my iron gloves

My rubber let me love people
without burden of their slaughtered innocence

the black let father raise his voice
but his words collapsed
somewhere between the first and fourth letter

I wore them when I fell in love

I tightened them then

Love is a filthy thing

And I will not be caught touching it barehanded

I was handed pieces of people to carry
with dirt still trapped in their wreckage
Punishing my expressions
If I had forgotten their message

I was expected to hold their glass
And never drop them

Because my gloves were made to be sterile

Eventually I stopped noticing
They broke in my hands

And my hands were tattooed with
Shards of Glass

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Her

I sense you.

How you miss me
in unseen messages

I check our chats
Like I check the weather

The marks I left?
You still touch them when you’re drunk

Permanent

You’ll never forget

Warnings of what would happen

All that liquor

No control

Here I am

Unable to hit send.

Him

did you miss me?

I feel it when you begin each text

three floating dots
where you used to breathe

blinking in the spaces
where you used to be

They bleed like a pulse
underneath my skin

Your silence swallows me
Like cheap spirit

We broke each other

Your lipstick still stains my white shirt collar

I should burn it

I don’t

Pick up next time

Her

You woke me up

Skin breaking apart
underneath the moon

inhumane
in voices left unsent

Imprinted

choke on silver

Drool escapes my teeth

would you still lick it up

funny that you think this is over

Him

I tore into you

As if my hunger
Could be turned to love

Silver rests against my throat

Pull tighter
As I start to choke

You looked holy

I still wake up
with blood in my mouth
when I think of yours

Call me

Her

high wore off

I almost hit send

My stomach is empty

Everything tastes like withdrawal

Im starved for you

The high wore off
You didn’t

My feral body refuses life without you

A pact of defiance that I wrote for you

Why the fuck
Are you not responding

Power.

That’s what we wanted from each other

You knew

That we’d shatter to pieces

Squeeze a glass
Just to feel something

I waited for you
In the drafts unsent

We didn’t give each other
many options

I’ll see you
when you finally hit send

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