House of Pain (Poem)

 Someday, this world is gonna realize that it was wrong 
That you deserve your own kitchen, and you deserve to be kissed in the rain
You deserve sleepy Sunday afternoons and driving at 3:00 AM just to listen to your favorite song… not to escape any pain left at your doorstep
Where else do you leave pain? Other than the home you grew up in…
I hid the darkest parts of me in cookie jars and the miscellaneous drawer in my grandpa’s desk
I displayed the best parts of myself in my grandmother’s Fine China Cabinet and inside the chest of every person I have ever loved
I have catapulted my heart from one man to the next 
Hoping that somehow someone will see the pain left at the doorstep and won’t run away at first glance 
If you are lucky enough to get inside the house there are a few rules I think you should know
In my room, there is a TV that is stuck on the same scene of me being carried upstairs after watching Noah’s Ark on VHS tape to my Disney Princess-themed bed
As if watching the same scene over and over again can recall that same love my father gave me
In my room, there is a cracked mirror that I only look into once a year, to remind myself I still have green eyes and that is the only part of me I have never hated 
In my room, I have a roll-top desk that manages to pinch my fingers every time I close it 
There is also a first aid kit that’s been sitting at the top of the closet for the past 8 years waiting to be used on someone other than myself
My curtains are torn and the carpet has spots 
My dresser drawers are filled up with everything good I’ve ever done
My mistakes are framed and put on the walls and my faults linger outside my door like a bead curtain 
Every compliment, I have ever received is hidden under my bed for me to pull out only when I need it, I won’t lie… I often forget they are there
My bed is more like a coffin, where I crawl back to when things get hard
My garage has an empty gas can, I don’t think it’s ever been filled 
The basement is locked. Don’t go in there
Appearances matter to me so please acknowledge the flower beds out in the front yard, the uncracked steps that lead to the house, and the power-washed window frames
My living room is filled with beautiful things, it is where everything I ever loved is displayed 
Please have a seat and make yourself comfortable… I’ll take your coat and put it on my bed for when you leave
There is a Doberman of anger who likes to bite, he tends to lash out as soon as you get the chance to pet him who sleeps in my bed
So if you’re lucky enough to enter this heart… I mean house of pain
I hope you don’t run and hide when I bring out the cookie jar or ask you to retrieve the scissors from the drawer 
Or ask you to grab your coat…

Red Hands (Poem)

Growing up, I always thought I was gonna be a doctor, surgeon, or even a veterinarian… I had always prayed that my hands would be used for healing. 
So when I got drafted into Tuesday morning and school at 8:00 AM… I was a little surprised. 
I marched in the lines like a good soldier. I kept my head up and my shoulders squared and made the enemy lines look me in the eyes just to prove I wasn’t scared. 
I was surprised that even though it was 8:00 AM on a Tuesday blood still covered my hands. I’m not sure if it’s mine or Jessica’s… the blood is still just red.
I used to self-harm… as if a small metal blade had the power to banish the scary thoughts I harbored at such a young age. 
The funny thing is when you’re 20 years old, the world seems a lot kinder than it did at 5… and maybe because it is… or maybe you just got used to it. 
When I was 16 years old, I sat in my grandpa's living room. I don’t remember what was going on, but it was quiet. All I could feel was his hands on me. Memories flashed through my head like an old picture film… some of which I swear were in black and white. As I sat there… I remembered my uncle's face when he told me not to make a sound… and that I was special… 
I called my grandfather into the room. And I dissected the parts of my brain that were once scared over… I had been molested…. 
When my grandpa put two and two together… my tragedy and trauma took his voice. 
I searched for his voice under every cookie jar lid and dust bunny… He held me in his arms and his hands holding me told me more than his words ever could. 
It took him about a week to recover to finally say something, all he could choke out was “I am sorry.” 
As if I blamed him, As if he could have done something, anything to stop the pain that was bestowed upon me from the moment I entered crying. 
My grandfather in all his anger, never told me he wanted to kill my uncle but the look in his eyes was all I needed… 
His anger was quiet… which is a lot scarier than I thought it could have been
He had red hands from sins I don’t know about and memories he can’t recall. 
Aren’t we all just people with red hands? 
When I was 16, I started therapy… and I realized that I was the product of red hands…
See I learned in biology those things called dominant and recessive traits
When both parents have the same trait, the percentage chance of their child having the same trait is higher or lower. 
I got both of my parent’s red hands
As if a dominant trait can banish you from ever having clean hands again
In therapy, I learned
Maybe these hands are covered in blood, but maybe they can still heal anyway. 
So I took the water that poured from my Savior’s side and with his blood, I was washed clean
My blood-covered hands that were taught to hurt had been healed
And because of His goodness and grace, I will forever try to help show people that their hands too can be cleaned
They don’t have to carry the blood-soaked hands anymore… they too can wash their hands
The devil likes to remind me of the times I had blood-covered hands.
He shows me the dried blood caked under my nails and that tells me I’ll never be truly clean
And I close my eyes and I get flashbacks to the horrors of looking down at red hands
But my hands aren’t red anymore
And neither are yours 
We can help each heal
And though it takes time, and it’s messy and gross
I hope you realize the blessing it is
That you can have clean hands too

Hot-Headed Heart

I’m hot-headed and always wearing my heart on my sleeve like it's been tattooed there since birth. But my skin is stretched now and has quite a bit of wrinkles. I hope you don’t think this thing beating inside my chest is ugly… it’s been 20 years of loving deeply, fully, and loudly and I think it definitely makes sense to have this much wear and tear. I hope when they do my autopsy they take the flaps of my chest and cover my heart back up just so no one ever has to see the ugly thing inside me.

Skinned-Knees

 When Jesus Christ was 12 and preaching in the synagogue do you think He had skinned knees? Was it from falling on the ground while playing with the neighborhood boys or all the times he spent on his hands and knees talking to His Father? 

Lungs/Love (Poem)

Loving people is a lot like breathing. Every inhale and exhale is a testament to how much I love you. 
But I’ve had asthma since birth, so I’m sorry if my breath starts to stutter and I can’t seem to catch it.
Sometimes I tend to get ahead of myself as if I could get a head start for something like breathing. 
I am sorry if my lungs are filled with smoke and water. 
I’m prone to filling myself with things that kill me. 
I am sorry that every breath I take sounds garbled and gross. 
I promise it’s not a reflection of who I think you are. 
I actually think you are great 
I think that you’re the feeling an 11-year-old gets when they smoke for the first time but don’t inhale. 
You just seem that cool. 
I am sorry I treat you like a mother who would rather smoke a cigarette than go to her kid’s baseball game. 
I promise I don’t mean to… 
I don’t intend to make it seem like loving you is like drowning but 
I think I started suffocating from the first… “hello.”
I don’t mean to make it seem like I wasn’t meant to love you… 
But I won’t lie, I am starting to think that lungs weren’t made for water or smoke… 
And my love wasn’t made for you… 
When they decide to autopsy my dead body
They will see the black marks and the wet residue you left with every breath
Even in my death, they will see evidence of you 

My Version of the Honest Poem

I am a molecule of water in the vastness of the ocean, how will you ever find me?
I know I have curly hair that’s a mess but I don’t know how to calm down the frizz
I know I have green eyes, which some have compared to a caramel latte, which is brown, so good luck with that
I really like it when guys know how to smell good and give good hugs
I've been told that I’m a Gemini because I was born on June 10th, I don’t know what that means
I have been catapulting my heart into relationships so I’m sorry if you don’t like used products
I am 5’5 on a good day, and 5’3 every other day
I have this emptiness that swells inside my chest and it leaves me cold
Addictions run rampant through my family and alongside my veins
Sorry, is that too much?
How my favorite color is stormy blue, but specifically the blue that the sky turns at 6:15 on a summer day in which the lightning cracks through the sky just like the anger in my eyes 
Kinda like this
I have realized that I am literally just a melting pot of everyone I have ever loved, stealing parts of them just to make up for the fact that I will never know my true self
I really like Matcha lattes with honey and vanilla, but I only started liking them a year and a half ago
As a Midwesterner, the best place to be at 10:00 PM on a Sunday is a Waffle House
I hate Waffle House food
Every heartbreak I have ever been blessed with happened in my 2004 Ford Tauras
I like to play hopscotch with my feelings and when I fall, I fall hard... Most of the time landing on my hands and knees and praying for forgiveness
Forgiveness oozes from my lips, like honey from a honeycomb
I hope that when I get up to Heaven my great-grandmother Ruby will be up there rocking in her chair with that scrawny rat dog on her lap
I hope that there are matcha latte's there and I'll get to share one with you every Friday, or Tuesday or whenever you get the time
I hope I never have to watch the clock like I am running out of time
I hope when I get up to Heaven, Christ will understand all the hurt and all the pain
And how I tried to love throughout it
I hope he sees my efforts and they weren't in vain

I did get inspiration from Rudy Francisco's "My Honest Poem." I hope I did a fraction of it justice for myself. I do not claim any rights to his works. 

Where does one go?

Where does one go to feel the love of a mother? Where does one go to be held, cradled, and taught that this world is cruel? Where does one go to unlearn the rage of a father? Where does one go to unlearn the heartache of a mother? Where does one go to be taught that not all that glitter is gold? Where does one go to be taught that not everything in this life is to have and to hold? Where does one go to feel loved all the time? Where does one go to teach that to hate is a war crime?

A bad person

 I was not a bad person at 15, I didn't even know what it meant to be a person yet. I was just a girl trying to find my identity in all the wrong things and love all the wrong people. (I will never hate her) 

Closed/Open

I am a closed book, so when you opened me up and broke my spine, I was positive I would tear out pages of myself just for you to read just so you could see a glimpse of me. 

The only thing I have to offer

 I am so sorry that my love only manifests as lust... it's the only way I think you'll want me. I'm sorry that I always think you want something as if the only thing I have to offer is myself. 

Slut

They look at me like my worth will only ever add up to be what's in between my legs: as if the only thing I have to offer to him is a warm place for him to park his cold hands. They look at me as if my desire for connection will only ever be physical, something to touch. As if I don't have a heart, a soul that yearns to be connected with another, a desire to be held and to be known. 

Healing

 Healing will never come in the arms of another human being. Healing comes from the peace of being alone, the peace in knowing that the only person who can hurt you now is you. Peace comes from protecting your peace and not jumping headfirst to the next man who promises never to leave. Healing comes from self-improvement and realizing the only person who can love you good, is you. 

Grief

What is grief if not the pain of love in its most simple form? To love someone is to watch them slowly die and choose to do so anyway.  

Pinky promise

 When you pinkie promised to me that you'd never leave, did you know that same hand you used to intertwine with mine would be the one who dropped my heart? Did you know that the human heart can shatter in 3,462 ways and you have perfected every single way? 

Names Change

 It's funny to me how names can change. When I first met you, you had the same name as my high school bully who tortured me every day just to see me cry. Thank you for not having the same cruelty in your eyes when you looked at me. 

A brother

 When I first met you, I didn't know I was allowed to see you as a brother. I tried to force feelings that didn't exist because I thought in order to love you, I had to see you as an object of my desires—as if the love of a brother can't heal the hands of a former lover. 

P.S. Jonathan, I am so sorry for the hurt this world gave you. I hope you heal and talk with your friends about your little sister across the world. I hope you know you will always have someone in your corner even when you don't feel like it. 

Love (Verb)

 Love is a verb. It is an action. If you don't do it fully, if you don't feel it deeply, if you don't feel it with every fiber of your being... You are doing it wrong. Love demands to be given and taken like a passing currency. 

Adrenaline

 My love for you was like the adrenaline coursing through my veins, it was fleeting and momentary but it had me crawling back to you even after you left me wounded on the floor.

Abandoned?

Can love be abandoned? Can it be put in the back of the closet like a box of memories you swear you were going to throw away? But you just can’t bring yourself to do… As if getting rid of the dusty polaroids and moldy keepsakes deletes the person entirely

The boy who sits two chairs down from me in my high school sophomore English class, I hope this finds you well (Poem)

The boy who sits two chairs down
He reminds me of leather jackets 
And rock and roll
But not in the way you would think
It isn’t loud or too much 
It's soft and perfect 
He has messy hair and tan skin
When he first came here, he had an accent
Something British and almost posh
He no longer has that accent
I almost miss it
We do not know each other
But he seems nice
Like cigarette smoke in the basement 
And the soft bass playing
We know nothing about each other
But he sits two chairs down

P.S. If this ever finds you, which I doubt it will. I think of you often. Not for what we could have been but just because you were cool and I wasn't. I hope you are doing well and got out of that hell hole.

Commitment

Maybe in another life, we could have been lovers, we could have pulled through the dark cold winter nights by keeping each other warm. But your hands are frostbitten and mine are too scared to exit the confines of my jacket pockets.

In this Life

I hope I get to see you in every life, every universe, in every time loop, in every minute, and every morning. Cause God knows that I couldn’t get enough of you in this life.

Yearning

I wanna be held all night long and brought closer to his warmth and I wanna know I’m safe and feel loved but how is it possible to crave something you’ve never even had?

Recognize

I recognize you in the way that I now drink hot tea with cream, in the way that I always add an egg to my ramen because you made me try it. In the way that when I hold people’s hands I rub my thumb along their knuckles

Tail lights

I think we were always meant to say goodbye but I just didn’t know it would be this quickly. It was like passing each other on a country road, each one of us almost fully in the grass but somehow still almost touching… you were the tail lights peeling out of the driveway.

Orpheus as a type of love

You are like Orpheus, you love so deeply and so strongly that you’ll end up hurting yourself, my dear. If you were cursed and if you looked at something you loved you would die. You’d open your eyes looking at me and die with a smile knowing I was the last thing you saw.

Stare at the Wall

 Sometimes I like to stare at the wall and think that you’re staring at a different wall half across the planet and thinking about me but I know that you’re probably going to pick up the groceries and not ever thinking of me in the same way I think about you

Lightning (Poem?)

Touching you was like lightning but not in the way that you think. It wasn’t lovely or invigorating. It wasn’t electrifying and it didn’t make every bone in my body come alive. It was painful. I felt all I had to give empty itself onto the bathroom floor. Can we just talk about the bathroom floor for a minute? The bathroom floor is such a timeless space. You can have the worst mental breakdowns in your life, the ones that are snot-filled and gasping for breath. But you can also have the laughs that make your stomach hurt, that make you keel over in pain. And then there are the moments when time freezes. You feel completely alone. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can slide down the bathroom door and feel nothing. But I guess I had all of those with you. I had the shaking, quaking, and lying on the cold floor wishing I felt full

Repentance

Sometimes I like to think about how repentful Judas was to Jesus but never got the chance at forgiveness

What is your love like?

 I like to think that my love is like Achilles and would be able to tear all of Troy down in one swoop due to my bustling anger, and self-righteousness, but I know that my love is much more quiet than that, I’m scared that you’ll even look at me

Loudly and Fully

 I hope you love loudly and fully and understand that I’ll never be part of that.

Growth

I hope you grow in ways that I’ll never see, I hope that your roots go deeper than our relationship ever was 

Loneliness

 I hope you realize that you had loneliness because you wouldn’t look at me

A cross between

 All I will ever be is a cross between my mother's heartache and my father's rage

The Pretty Girl (Poem)

The pretty girl tastes like apple juice and peach
I look like I taste like leftover cigarette smoke and bleach
I am not pretty
When I get some self-hatred thoughts
I do this thing where I pick at my skin
I do it until I bleed. I do it anywhere on my body that I see a chance to pick
My face, my boobs, my thighs, my fingers
The pretty girl doesn't have scars all over her
The pretty girl has freckles on her nose
And big blue eyes
I have acne scars that are almost the equivalent of her amount of freckles 
I have green eyes
Which my mom tells me I should be grateful for 
But the only thing I am grateful for is the toilet after a big meal
Oh and the calorie counter on all the packages in my house

Master's Table

 Sometimes I feel like a dog under the master's table in our relationship. I beg for love and affection and any ounce of forgiveness you can spare. I feel like I only get the scraps off the table. I only get a taste of it before I turn back to my starving stomach a deep ache for something more filling.

Skin on Skin

 I want to touch you, everywhere, as if my hands could heal all your brokenness. As if I was your solace giving you life, I want to touch on the idea that touching you somehow heals a part of me. I want to feel your skin on mine, as if it was the only warmth I had ever known. I want to pull you like a child who yearns for the mother's heartbeat once again.

Body Count

 They ask me what my body count is…as if the amount of people you killed is justifiable. As if the amount of love you can give someone else is enough. as if grief could be explained. They ask me what my body count is but refused to ask me how many versions of myself I killed along the way to get to where I am. They ask me what my body count is as if the amount of people I’ve left behind is measured and meaningless.

Warmth (Poem)

It has been 44 days and 10 hours since I was last held

Today I burned my hair in the shower from staying in the heat too long 

Just trying to remind myself what it was like to feel warm

My hands are trembling

My bones are frozen 

I am so cold 

A cold that I can’t escape

A cold that casts over me like your love once did 

I am cold 

And I long to feel warm again 

I was looking for warmth in everything

On the way, I held my phone waiting for your text 

In the way I cooked my food, hoping you’d join me for dinner 

On the way I curled into bed, hoping I’d wake up and you’d be there 

In the hope that you will be there 

I was wishing on every star I saw

And every car that passed by  

But it was not enough

In my pain, you never consoled me

I had to wipe my own tears away. 

But when you weren't there I was.

In begging for you, I found something else 

I found me

Barista

 I wish I was a barista at your local coffee shop just so I could see you before 7:00 AM every day

Like a cat

You leaving was like a cat getting ready for a bath, you’re claw marks ripped into my flesh and tore at all of the marks and scars I had learned to love  

Like a dog

 You left like a dog being scolded, with your head down and tail between your legs. You never even begged for forgiveness or fought for my love

Removing

 The day came when I had to remove you from my love board, it felt like not breathing, each picture of you I had to remove felt like the knife was twisted and when I was done, I dropped the blade of the knife that helped me remove the staples, I heard it cling against the floor as I openly wept. The only sound in the house just like the day you left.

The Love of a Mother

Momma in my mind you’re already dead. I spent the first twenty years of my life grieving for the relationship we never had. I hate carrying this grief inside my chest, And now that you’re really dying I don’t know if I can stomach losing you again.  

Taste

You don’t know me, but you know how I throw my head back when I laugh. You don’t know me but you know how my jaw curves like the back of your hand. You don’t know me but I know how you taste.