Of Wastelands

There is not one man hollow enough
To place all myself inside.
There is no one to be a cave to my secrets,
A barren land for me to paint myself upon.
There are none with hands so empty
They could hold my troubles and my dreams
Without letting them slip between the spaces.
I am too much, I fear,
For anyone to want to enclose,
Too much of a feeler,
Too much of a bitch,
A lover,
A dreamer,
A taker.
Too selfish for any love to seep out myself and into them.
Too much of a woman to breathe inside.
And I am too empty,
Too volatile,
Too mean,
To be tamed or taught,
Saved or lost
Inside a man not big enough for me.

04/10/2011

I want to tell you that I love you.
I want to tell you that my hands reach out to grasp
Some things they cannot grasp
And each one that they miss
Reminds me of you.
I want to tell you that the streets of all my veins
Run rampant with the thought
Of you and me
Singing softly
In the night
Against the overstuffed mattress,
Beneath a powdery white blanket
Where we lay entwined
And my fingers grasp at you
And you at me.
I want to tell you that I think you’re beautiful
And not because your face is symmetrical
Or because your half-smiles kills my heart a thousand times per day
And not because you’re taller than me
And your shoulders are broad
And your eyes light me up
And spark my insides like
One hundred fireworks in the middle of April
For simply no reason at all.
I want to tell you that you’re beautiful for the words you say
And the ones you don’t.
I want to tell you that I think of blossoms
And beaches
And cardboard cut out dyed-red candy-filled heart-shaped boxes
And sentimental holidays that I overlook every year.
I want to tell you that I love you,
That I don’t expect for you to love me back
Or want to reach
And grasp
And lie
And love
Me too.
I just want to tell you so you know,
Know that your soul is admired and someone wakes up with you on her mind
Every single day of the week
And that you don’t have to do anything
But remember the warmth is here for you
If ever you should need it.

Everything that I said I�'d do, like make the world brand new and take the time for you, I just got lost and slept right through the dawn, and the world spins madly on.

these are the things my generation is most concerned with:

• love; finding it, keeping it, giving it, losing it, holding it, throwing it away.
• themselves
• each other
• being a part of something
• the music
• the laughter
• the tears
• the wars
• the deaths; the unnecessary, the timely, the sudden, the struggle.
• the words that seem to speak to us in a way can't speak to each other
• the moments
• the stand against or for
• the expression
• the VOICES
• the whispers
• the dreams we kept through childhood and still keep in our minds
• the adventure
• the money; making it, saving it, spending it, gambling it, losing it, wanting it
• the ground beneath our feet
• the sky above our heads
• the unknown
• the known
• the art
• the government; for it, against it, rebellion, speaking out, staying silent, fighting it, taking it over.
• the need for peace and not knowing how
• holding hands
• burning bridges
• burning whole cities
• rebuilding lives
• getting knocked down, kicked around, smacked, punched, broken, and getting up just to have it happen again
• the continuous need to keep getting up
• the fight
• the survival
• the giving up
• the breaking away
• hiding away
• sleeping the days away
• making a dime
• serving the french fries
• healing the sick
• doling out the drugs
• making a friend
• kissing the enemy
• never knowing
• always knowing
• always wishing
• never hoping.

no definitions.

It's always the thought of treasure
that gets me every time --
Rubies for your mouth,
gold coins in your eyes.
Bury me off some
long-forgotten shore.
Leave no "X"
I'm only yours.

I think I saw you in my sleep, darling, I think I saw you in my dreams you were
stitching up the seams on every broken promise that your body couldn't keep.
I think I saw you in my sleep.
I thought I heard the door open, oh no. I though I heard the door open,
but I only heard it close.
I thought I heard a plane crashing, but now I think it was your passion snapping
I think you saw me confronting my fear,
it went up with the bottle and went down with the beer and
I think you ought to stay away from here. There are ghosts in the walls and they
crawl in your head through your ear.
I think I saw you in my sleep, lover, I think I saw you in my dreams you were
stitching up the seams on every mangled promise that you body couldn't keep.
I think I saw you in my sleep.
-La Dispute, "Such Small Hands"

oh anna, you're a house of many rooms and all the secrets deep entombed within you, i know a few ♥

One day you fall for this boy and he touches you and it burns holes in your skin.

I just want to give up. Give up and crawl under a rock and forget the last five years ever happened.

I wonder what it's like to run away, so far away that you lose yourself entirely. Is there any place in the world so empty you wouldn't even fit inside? I'd like to go there if I could. Oh, if I could leave it all behind (including every inch of me I'd like to lose) I think I could find some semblance of me (some purer form than I could be) that isn't here.

I'd like to be remade. I'd like to die and be reborn - received - reconstituted - rehashed - released into the world. All new; shiny and clean and made for everything thrown into my hands. Could we live another life? If given the opportunity (let's be honest) who wouldn't want a second chance?

I find I am always with a scream at the back of my throat - weighing on all the words I'll never say. It wraps itself inside my body - so close to all my many parts I am nearly sure I'd die without. What if I let it loose? Would I cease to exist without that scream anchoring me to this earth? Sometimes I believe it is the only part of my humanity I have left.

I see people and I freeze. I no longer am present inside of myself. I think that's where the scream began. My last attempt to exist in a world that has no need for me. But, I hold it back and I hold it in. No one else needs to know what I keep inside.

I don’t know where it takes me. No, not when I think of you. I don’t know where it is my mind has wandered off to, but I find I like it less and less each day that goes by. I’m beginning to feel that everyday is a trap. Everyday I wake up with some sort of shabby made up positive countenance, and with each passing moment it crumbles down. Little by little.

I don’t mean to be so dramatic. I don’t even want anyone to know where it is my mind has gone with all its flights away from me. I really just wish someone could catch it. Mid-air…I’d like to see it grabbed out of that sky and given back to me and kept inside for good. For once.

Its just that there’s this empty spot inside of me that you created and that I’ve tried some days to ignore and others to pack it so tightly with things and people and feelings and places that don’t really matter and even other days I find myself lying in that void, absorbing all the nothingness of something that had once been everything.

I don’t want you and your impact on me to be the only thing I know. I don’t want that false love to be the only love I understand. I’d like to feel it and hold it just once. I desperately just want to know that love can be good.

I don’t understand the hurt that people bring to each other and to themselves. I don’t understand the need to bring other people down or to establish one as better than the others. I mean, in all honesty, we’re all the same.

Despite hair color, eye color, financial situation, body type, religious beliefs, political standing, education level, health, and a million other things about ourselves we like to think set us apart from everyone else, we’re all the same. We all need the same basic things. One day we’re all going to die. It doesn’t matter what made you unique. We all will encounter the same end.

So, no, I don’t understand. We’re all in this together. We should make it easier for each other. We should love freely, give freely, dole out compassion, empathy, sympathy, hope, prayer, love, dreams, money, food, hugs, etc. I don’t get the selfishness of people. I don’t know if I ever will.

So, yes. I want love. I want to give it away. I want someone to give it to me. I want to take that hole you carved inside of me and fill it with the most freely given, passionate, caring, hopeful, faithful love I could ever imagine. Because of you, I am selfish and needy for that. I don’t think I could ever settle for less again.

I hold out for it now. I don’t need to waste my time. Maybe it will be tomorrow. Maybe it will be when I’m sixty-five. I want the world to know it doesn’t matter when it happens, just that I hope it does.

lost at sea, drift to me.

I am lonely. I am tired. I am anxious.
Stressed.
Frustrated.
Angry.
Hopeless.
Annoyed.

I'm also happy. I'm content. I'm excited.
Loved.
Filled with awe.
Inspired.

It's such a balancing act. We teeter and we totter and we never know where we'll end up, just that it's always changing, everyday.

Gotta learn to roll with it.

let's be better than we are.

I do not believe in doing things half-assed, which I suppose, is why i don't believe in dating around. I don't like to waste time of my own or of others. I think it's important to do the things you want to do to the fullest of your ability, to drown yourself in all of your creations, to take a leap without looking to where you'll land, because you need the experience and the life and the love and the exhilaration that can fill you, overflow, and weep out of your soul and fill the earth with all of you. I don't believe in stopping before starting. I don't believe in hiding yourself. If you want to dance, dance. If you want to laugh, laugh. And, especially, if you want to love, love with all of yourself and then some. No one deserves less. Especially not you.

I want someone to be true to.

We're going to have wonderful lives, I promise.

Sometimes you love people and you know it will never work, so you put up this barrier that keeps them at a safe distance. Sometimes you love people and know it will never work, but no matter what you do they scale that wall and break your heart. Sometimes you love people and you don't build a barrier because honestly, it isn't worth the labor time. And, sometimes you love people so much you tear down your own wall just for the small hope that they're going to want to come into your kingdom and love you too.

I think it's important to recognize the lessons life has dealt you. Here are a list of mine.
-People will only change when they want to, not when you want them to.
-Just because a relationship didn't work out with you doesn't mean it won't work out with someone else.
-Everyone has exceptions to their rules.
-Half the things you gain that you had previously thought you wanted more than anything, you don't really want once you have them.
-It really does take all kinds of people to make the world spin.
-Everything keeps on happening around you whether you're in the midst of it or holed up in your room somewhere.
-It is better to dance and look like an idiot than to never dance at all, or worse, only watch others dance.
-The friends who let you get into trouble because they know you want to and will protect you while you're in the middle of said trouble, are more important in life than the friends who never want you to do anything that might cause a stir anywhere.
-Sometimes you outgrow people, and that's okay.
-People will never cease to surprise you.
-Sometimes you get hurt. Sometimes your heart breaks. You can't help what other people do to you. You can only change your response.
-Jealousy is a waste of time.
-If you want to eat your feelings, okay, just run an extra mile in the morning.

I'm sure there are more, but I wanted to document these in case I forget them later on.

I am so tired of the boys with the
200 dollar pair of jeans and the
two hundred dollar haircuts who care more about
music, their image, and what comes out of their mouths,
than what goes on inside their own heads.

7x7x7

Grab the 7th book from your bookshelf. Open it up to page 7. Pinpoint the 7th sentence on the page. Begin a poem that begins with that sentence and limit it in length to 7 lines.

But the moment I remember more than any other;
A swatch of light across your face,
Shaded in and out, like a spotlight not quite sure of it’s object.
Your lips might have been quivering,
I do not know,
But I remember this moment, among all the other moments, the best.
It was like I could read you, and this, my favorite line.

lift away.

Don't you ever just ache for the world? Like those moments in your car with the radio playing a song that fits everything you feel so perfectly, and there's one, maybe two, cars in sight, and all the stars are shining despite the city smog. And, the highway signs fly by in flashes of green/yellow/white and all those broken lines separate the traffic like straight rows of white ants marching backward. Your heart starts to hurt, but your soul lifts and you don't know what this feeling is, but it's good and it's bad all at once, and you want -NEED to do something with it, but you don't know how. So, you keep listening to that song and watching the signs go by and you wonder why everything in life isn't so simple and complicated simultaneously, and you want to weep because it's just all so beautiful.

010911

He doesn't look, and, I suppose that it is okay. It is okay for me to just want and know that I'm capable again to see someone, and let that be enough. He might not think of me and that's alright as well. I have him in my thoughts. Most of the time that is plenty. Other times it is not, and still others, too much.

I find it strange (I find me strange) that I live mostly from thought to thought, and in between I manage to insert myself into the world and exist as boldly as I am capable, and then retreat into myself again with just as much intensity. It is like that with him; so much, then none, then a little. I'm not quite sure how to balance anything.

I do not know what it is that intrigues me so. Perhaps all feelings for others begin with a slight touching of souls. Maybe then you spend the rest of your time with them attempting to recapture that moment, sometimes succeeding, but mostly not. It is the 'not' that keeps us wondering and makes us think we are somehow failing at human connection. And, oh, that hurts, so we ache and we retreat. The moments pass and we create this barrier to keep the light of each other from touching. And, then it's a desperation we cannot name.

This longing, it seems to me such a silly, but beautiful game.

To be sure, I am only certain of a few things: the grass is green, but not always; the sky is at its prettiest in the midst of the grayest winter; one day I will die; and one day this will all make sense, even if it is only the realization that it will never make sense.

madness.

How does madness look? Is there a wildness that lingers around the iris of the eye --creeping into the blues or greens or browns to give insanity away? Is it a thing that can be pinpointed? Can it be touched or defined, held or seen? Is it a manner of speaking, the way a person stands --how they slouch their shoulders? Or, is it obvious from what they hold dear?

I believe in madness, in the way a person sees the world; no two could be the same. Where and how one does find faith is individual, a specific type of insanity that serves as an excuse to right our being here.

Is crazy just another way of dealing with existence? Are reality and imagination really separate entities? If I believe in science and you believe in God, what difference is there but the face we give creation?

Madness comes in sizes that vary as much as faces. Little bits of hilarity tucked into our minds, seeping out at times. It leaks like water through a sieve and you could never plug up all of the holes.

And what is it that makes us whole, but the entirety of our minds? And, minds are silly, tricky things. We never embrace them fully. Out of fear of who we are or could be? I don't know.

I have lived the majority of my life living inside my mind and when asked where my thoughts have taken me I waste such time explaining madness away.

I don't believe there could ever be such a reason, such a person, or such an occurrence that could ever convince me that a little bit of crazy could ever be a bad thing.

Everything that happens is from now on.

This year is about the change, the experience, the loves of my life, the friends, the family, the learning, the new things, the wondrous things life can bring me. I'm throwing away the person I always wanted to be and I'm just going to go with me. How I feel, how I dress, and learn, and think, and write, and love.

It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away