i was you
look at how far i’ve come
you’ll go so much further
love,
the older and way gayer me
leftovers
In no particular order, selfish things I miss about you:
+ Knowing I would always have someone in the audience
+ Having an excuse to buy you things
+ Always having someone’s hair to play with
+ Constant poetic inspiration
+ Having someone who never gets tired of my positivity
+ Cold-bitten faces
+ Hands that are always warm
+ Butterflies and zoos
+ Sore lips from kissing someone too many times
+ Cheesy pickup lines
+ Eternal love in every moment
In no particular order, selfish things I don’t miss about you:
+ Recklessness
+ Crying
+ Me
honest once more
Loving me is
Loving the theatrical mess
Loving the afraid
Loving the broken
Loving the eyebags
Loving the cardigans
Loving the flyaways
Loving the rolling on the floor laughing at memes
Loving the poet
Loving the girl who doesn’t want to write sometimes
Loving the girl who’s tired of loving
I am often tired of loving
Fearlessness and
Patience and
Beauty and
Confidence and
Loving is fucking exhausting
But the artist inside me
Wants to keep loving
So somehow I must find the energy
To let myself fall
Just a few more times
+trying
The first time I saw that you’d made me a playlist
Based off of my twitter handle,
I felt the tears come.
When you changed the name from +trying to +loving
When we started dating,
I felt the tears come.
The last time I opened up my spotify
You’d hit the backspace on that piece of your life.
“When in love” was the new name.
“When in love” was the gift you gave me.
I felt the tears come.
In complete honesty,
Rancho at night does not seem to match up to the halls I walk during the day.
For then, I can pretend the starry sky
And the cold air and the warm hands and the blanket I brought for you do not exist.
During the day, I can pretend that the pyramid is as ancient as it’s sisters.
I can pretend that I read you my poetry on the other side of the world.
I can pretend that maybe that poetry wasn’t mine.
It wasn’t mine.
I want to erase it,
But erasers never really clear the words off of the paper completely.
I wish they could,
Maybe I could write a new poem in its place,
But, you see, I only write in black pen.
I stood up in front of a crowd of strangers to declare my love for you.
I felt the eyes boring into me as I walked up to the mic and acted,
As I read a poem that took weeks.
I am an actress.
I did it all for you.
That was the most wretched way I have ever used both of my art forms at once,
And when you told me the man next to you said my piece was too much,
I brushed it off as you did.
I didn’t write for a month.
Because the confidence to walk up to that mic in the first place
Had already put me in debt with myself,
The confidence to sit back down as two people out of thirty applauded for me took even more.
It took two and a half weeks across the country
And performing the revised poem in New York City to a crowd who gave a standing ovation
To pay that back.
We stopped writing poetry to eachother after a while.
In complete honesty, I was glad.
It always felt like you wanted more from me,
And I gave it.
I gave until I was heaving words,
Pouring them out of lips I didn’t love anymore.
My poems to you were forced and unpolished,
A window into my clouded mind.
No revisions.
No
