I’m pounding on the glass until my fists bleed. I scream until my throat tastes like iron and I cry until the ground around me turns to an ocean of my pain. Nothing does what it’s supposed to. Every help only doubles the hurt.

No one reaches out to help. No one asks about the pain I try and show them. A black hole of emptiness opens in me and everything I loved is unceremoniously thrown in until all I am is what I am afraid of most. It’s quite a long list.

And all you see is a composed girl with nothing beyond school in her head. If only you knew how big my demons were.

the poem is in 3rd person, it's not about me, it's about her, the girl i stare at from the back of the bus.

stop taking it all so literally, fiction is the basis of my reality and my reality is more than a string of words, so in the end it's all just nonsense and meaningless lies.

cut the letters out of my skin, paste them on a classroom wall and i will still be whole. peel them off once the kids know their sounds and they will still have purpose.

i'm a body of skin and bones, human (as we like to call ourselves), if ink were to flow where my blood now lives i'd be dead in my chair.

keep my heart above ground by acknowledging its biology. only a mad man sees flesh and cuts it open with the sharp end of a pencil.

Anger gets a bad wrap. Tempered souls we deem as wise caution against it, calling instead for measured responses and calm introspection. They don't burn rotting bridges for fear of losing their way. They accept what would outrage any civilized person. They fail to see; There are wrongs worth the fury, There are injustices worthy of wrath.

Trying to pull away from everything that hurts.

A mass of veins pulsing to leave your heart and let the beat die. The veins leap under your skin and slip around muscles to try and be free.

Trying to pull away from the good and the bad.

Nothing like crushing the sweet so the bitter haunts your tongue no more. Burn all the smells together in a fire of our best sins and you smell too much and feel too much and hear too much and in that moment you are nothing.

she gives me band-aids to heal wounds that no longer weep blood, but rather rest as scars upon my dry, cracked skin.

she shows up at my door to sing carols, putting stitches into my already whole heart as though her voice will forge something beautiful from my forgettably forgiving soul.

when she leaves, she says goodbye like this time it won't be the last, she's not done punishing herself for punishing me, despite the fact that my body recovered from her touch long ago.

the next time she'll say hi to me in the street it'll be with pity and with sorrow and with joy and with self-fulfillment.

she'll offer to buy me coffee, i'll tell her i don't drink it, she'll smile with her own stained teeth, nod, then walk away without another word.