A shadowed wail strikes with diamond knives

A fleeting bird sings and melancholy falls like rain

The sunniest days cannot stop their reprise

The sunniest days speckle years in vain.

Lock away this trenchant beast

Do not whisper me your lies

On my sorrow you may feast

With a smile at my demise

Late at night I hear your call

Murmuring rumors that disrupt the peace

Screaming when the silence falls

Do not touch: my beast

Soothe me, love me, feed my hollow conceit.

Drown me in delusions of grandeur

Coax me, kiss me, but do not deceit

Z will simply wash back ashore

Sweet androgynous ocean, my beast

Glows in salty sorrows

My sunset of red foreboding, at least

My broken veins Z flows

A shell washed up ashore

A pearly glimmer among a municipal of shattered sediment

A sheeny hue too lustrous, they abhor

The broken flecks too ruined to lament

Am I not quite so perfect to hang on a string for all too see

Whispers the undamaged heart

But not so broken to conform in the sandy masses of the sea

Let the weathering start

Just another shell swept up in her beauty

Lost in its terrifying magnificence

Falling in love with you was like getting into a cool pool on a hot summer day. I dipped my toe in, toying. Slow and strained. I fought back a bit, second-guessed myself, then all at once I dove happily into you. Underwater of our love I was lighter than air, softer than silk, safe.

Safe. 

I remember the moment I realized I loved you. We were walking by those marshes on the side of West Ferry Lane, where all the fireflies come out in the summer. We stopped to appreciate the speckled light from the creatures, reverentially mourning the freshly set sun, creating the backdrop to a serenely lustrous mood.

You smiled at me and then swiftly raised your hand and lightly smacked my cheek. “Damn mosquitos,” you laughed. I bit my bottom lip, a million "I love you's" running through my head. I had no idea that the gentle death of a mosquito would transgress into the death of my unabridged optimism.

Abuse is funny like that. It can reduce a soul to a desolate whisper beyond repair. However, my sad soul is a creature of habit, and every time I see you I'm unrealistically transported to the same safe feeling. Occasionally, when you crawl into my everyday thoughts, the memory of us momentarily freezes everything inside of me while my heart folds into my lifeless soul, and I can see the thought of you suspended in the air in front of me, spreading painful nostalgia through every cell of my body. Then with a slap sharper than the death a of mosquito, my whispering soul, along with the untouchable memory of you dissipates into thin air. 

It is not my fault that you waited to reveal the transient monster that shadows your best self. It is not my fault that I fell in love with half of a person. It is not my fault that you loved me so much you hurt me, but you didn't love me enough to stop. It is not my fault that you crushed my soul like you crushed that mosquito. 

Just flesh,

My skin that makes me beautiful, ugly, fat, perfect, a slut, a bitch, privileged or posh.

Just my skin and bones.

My skin is saturated in hopes and pleas, red with guilt and lust

My skin is aflame in the colors of my thoughts, burning in shame

My skin, is slowly melting.

My skin slides off my body in a delicate stream,

The way tears slide down my cheeks

Pooling at the corners of my lips.

An organized purge of dehydrated hopes.

I watch my flesh wash down my shower drain,

Hauntingly embraced by my salty spirit.

His unwanted hands and invading body stole my skin,

Uninvited in my bed.

Grasping the edges of my sink,

I watch the skin drip from a strangers face,

Crusting the porcelain with salty prayers

My skin soaks my sheets, as I wake from a nightmare,

Seeping with blood red thoughts.

I turn on the lights but it cannot assuage my blinding fears

As my skin melts into nothing, I hear it whisper to me.

Ostentatious with good intentions and candor

My colorfully dark mind gossiping with the air

Nothing, it says.

Your Fault,

It’s your entire fault.

The word nothing resounds and rinses away my essence in flesh,

Like spring rain rinses away the winter snowfall,

Leaving behind a broken, depleted, mud stained earth.

Beneath my skin, it’s just bones.

My soul is whispering away in tides of melting skin.

But I grow back new skin.

And I watch it wash away again.

Soon I will be just a bag of broken bones.

When my skin is too tired to rebuild itself.

A tear. A smile. A broken heart. A recognized dream. A feeling of unparalleled joy, or a fear that punctures silence with its bloodstained deceit. A window into the soul of a peer delivered with a fundamental cadence. The articulation of a single touch.

A poem.

A whisper. A scream. An unprecedented fit of goose bumps, evoked by an unveiled splendor. A dynamic description of an ephemeral feeling.

A poem.

Poetry is the most mysterious art of articulation. She hides in the corners of ugly thoughts and shines in the grandeur of a sunset. Poetry suspends in the space between two hands or shouts in the deafening silence of a fight. Poetry defines everything so how can we define it?