Ashes

I died
Was cremated
And kept the ashes

As if I could bring them back
Or as if I would ever want to

An unnatural attachment
To my depravity
A disbelieving
Believing that I needed a backup
Just in case I couldn't keep up

I pray for a strong wind
To carry my ashes away
The sin of holding on
Believing that I could hold God in one hand
And my former life in other

Today I chose
To grab onto God with both hands
And never look back into the wind
Never wish that my ashes would fall back at my feet
And breathe death back into a body

I am for You
Not against You

Clean Me

The hands
Dripping sin
Breathed into me
And soaking through me

I beg for forgiveness again
I plead love
I ask for mercy

Cleanse me
Feeling like I did the day You found me
Face in the dirt
Barely breathing through my mud clogged pipes

Wash the blood from my hands

Get it away from me
I can not bear the sight of it anymore

Breathing through my pores
Through my bones
Through my joints

Living on Your life support

Plan B

When plan A fails it's fairly simple to run to the store, and for the right price, go with Plan B.

A nice fix for an uncertain future
But a poor substitute for a past

Pen

I tried to silence my pen
For the sake of a few scattered feelings
Or social etiquette

I tried to say that I couldn't find my own feelings
But they were there staring me in the face
As I continued
To look
At
My
Feet

For a thousands swirls of the same light
I wish that I would have found myself with yours

And now
I'm not sure if I want you
Or just want to stop feeling rejected

I can not say if I wounded you
With my indifference
That I faked

But I feel wounded
Down to the depths of my sutured heart
Wondering
Always
Wondering
Why

The timing always seems to be off
It's always off

And we could talk about anything
I loved your voice like I love the rain
A comforting sort of feeling

I wonder
Will we ever know what happened?

Or will we lie
For the sake of hiding our shame
Under layers of clothing

Doesn't always have to end...

Every time it happens
Months after the last episode
Or like the last time
Two years after I have ventured down that road

There's a part of me that hopes
Small hopes
Or what first appeared as an adolescent diving-head-first-without-looking
It's still there
And it surprises me every time

Whether it be the child or the hopeless romantic who I hide under sarcasm at dinner for the sake of a backwards sly smile there after right before I take a sip of my wine and wait for the laugh...

Something
Someone
Some alter ego
Some true identity

Hopes

That this is my fairytale
The one who always wants to work it out
For the sake of never being able to imagine waking up to another face in his life
My time
When I've paid my debt with enough broken hearts

To believe
That not everything that has a start
Has an ending

Habit

I have a habit
A long history, if you will
Of being with boys
Who make a habit of fighting for their pride
Before they ever fight for me

Am I drawn to it?

Or is it just what always finds a way
Into my life.

Brick Walls

The bed is cold in the middle
The bed is unworn in the middle
As plump and upright as the day that the mattress was bought

No one rolls to the middle, no one makes love in the middle, two people living together on opposite sides of the bed, opposite sides of the house, opposite sides of life.
They can hardly remember the days of laying in endless fields as if love were never ending. The first dance, it gets hard to remember when you find yourselves so scared of confrontation that lack of communication has sprout bitterness 10 feet high and 5 feet thick... brick.

Sometimes she wishes that they had talked out the first fight. She wishes that she hadn't just walked away all of those night. She wishes that she had not let fight after fight, miss-communication after miss-communication pour dirt over the fire of their love and take away what she believed was never ending... what should be never ending...

Leave

Once I wanted to be a part of your world

But your world holds no place for me

You've conveniently created a comfy space for one and the imprint looks just like you. I'm not in love with you, but once upon a time I wanted to be. I've let it leak into my life. I've let the selfish disregard for anyone but yourself come over into my world and consume it like poisonous fumes roaming about taking who they please.

Leave,

Let me stay where you found me

Bleeding.

Young

Sometimes I fear this all fading
I fear forgetting
The friends
Sitting in chocolate bars in downtown
In our 20's experiencing life
For what always seems like the first time

I wonder if you will all remember me
If some part of me will be left
On your life

I wonder if we will think of these times
When we are about to die

If I will always go home on these nights
Sitting in the condo alone
Wondering why I didn't get carded on the way home
Did I grow up?
When no one was looking
Am I really on my own as much as I think?

Will someone come home and save me from myself
My slightly tipsy self
Sitting at my computer
Waiting

Wondering if I'll ever have another to wait for
Who will greet me at the door
While I can hear his work shoes
Landing on the floor
From a mile away

I wonder about a good many thing
The mind of a young girl about to venture out into a life of careers
Hoping that she will forever live in these things

Away

I adore you.

As fireworks, oceans, mountains... streams...

Would it be awful of me, if for a few quick moments I wanted to believe that this is just how things are supposed to be.

If I asked for wings would that be too much?
The moment when my world burst into flames and I landed flat footed on earth again and found it hard to dream again.

Can I fly?

To a perfect place where this moment will last for days and days...
Take me away.

He Meant to Say

"It gets better"
He said it in his calm collected voice
The voice that he uses
When he wants me to think
He knows

But how could he
He's never been here
Never did that
And knows less than nothing
Then sits around selfishly wondering
Why I no longer feel obligated to tell him anything

"I don't know"
That's what he should have said
And it would have sufficed
It might have even eased the pain
The truth has an odd way of setting people free

But even lies
As believable as they may be
Unnamed for what they are
Still sting
Make me realize
I don't trust him

I almost trust him as little
As he trusts himself

It's raining
Like it does all the nights
That I am without him
And I used to think
That nature was acting out my own pain

But now I think
That it shines on dark days
And the rain is here to wash it all away
Reminding me
That sometimes in the midst of it all
There is still something to be said
For doing the right thing

"I'm sorry"
With the most sincere of tones

That's what the real version of him meant to say

Yeah, that's what he meant to say

The Blood of a Father

I wrote this poem about a year ago. I never posted it because of it's personal nature, however, I feel the need to be bold of late.

The first taste of death
Left none unscathed
Taking small pieces of us all
One by one
The blood of a father
Reeked havoc on the pride of a son
To be a man too soon
With no one to show him the way

That blood flowed through the hall
Soaking down to the floor boards
And no one knew
The same blood would destroy the innocence
Of a girl too young to know
A lovely girl
The moment of being out of control
Everything out of control
Left a little girl with wide open hands
Watching life seep through the cracks
And it left a boy to his own mind
Creating a world
Where he could control
Everything

It's the death
That the dead never wished upon anyone
The very exiting of one world
Destroying everything they loved
(And more that he only met once)

Once was enough
That blood on the floor was enough
To bond people
Possibly to death
Where no attachment should have existed
An unnatural union
And the sympathy for the son
Would be the very undoing

Of a little girl
A very little girl

Fool for You

There was a desire
For sweet words
In the form of cursive letters
Written to me
About all the things you love about me
With a calm affection
And a firm desire
To let me know
That it was only ever me
Only me

Now, I bleed your misery
And the lack of words
That you couldn't ever really give me
Sit with me
Like a rock
Crushing my ribs
And making my breaths
More difficult than they should be

I remember the first time you called me "baby"
It was like there was no one in the world
But the two of us
And the adolescent feelings of first love
Returned to me
After
Believing that I was broken
That I couldn't feel anything
They all came back to me
Like it was the first time
And my jaded heart
Was warm again

It was beautiful

Three moments after you talked about my picture, sitting on your desk and your daydreams about me... I felt my heart skip a beat and it hurt like coming back to feeling. Coming back to feeling... feeling... feeling you feeling me...

Sweet
Out of sorts and adoring
All the things that love was meant to be

Older now
Than when you first saw me

Walking into that room like a foreign country
I wonder if you remember
The way my face looked
When I first look at you
With a sly curiosity



Was I just a warm body in the end?
A body to fill the void
Of a little boy
Who never had anyone to talk to

I believe
That this was the only thing I meant to you

It helps when the sun falls
And I remember sitting on my balcony
Speaking about things
From a heart
That longed to escape the shadows
Of abuse

And it starts to hurt

And now
When I think about missing you
I close my eyes
And do my best to remember
That I never meant anything to you
I was a warm body
Another girl
Who played the fool
For a broken heart

I was a fool for you

"Tomorrow I'll know if the silver in your eyes/Crossing down on your cheek/And tomorrow I'll know by the rubies in your voice/They've been calling your name to me lately/You have been one of them waiting/I have been one of them falling/Down below/so tell me you're always my only/Never look down mother maple/If I go/Never look down if I go"
The Pilgriming Vine
Basia Bulat

Dance With Me

Looking out standing
On top of the roof
The city lights swirl
All around me in every direction
Beaming down on me
From impossibly tall building
Defying gravity
One metal scrap at a time

I twirl
Like a little girl
In floral print dresses
And a matching bow

This is where I belong
I want to experience everything
Being lit by the lights that I see
And breaking from the cement block
On which I am standing

There are things going on
I can feel it
In one of those buildings
A man is on his knee
Pledging eternal love
Love everlasting
There are people making memories
That build a lifetime

It makes me want to climb
To the top of one of those buildings
And have one rare night
Where I kick off my underground dancing shoes
Put on a pair of heels
And my little black dress that I've been saving for years

Reaching the top
To find flowers waiting for me
Held by gentleman
In a pressed tuxedo
And a nervous smile
Fading into a grown sort of confidence

Take me to the tallest building
Call me "Baby"
And hold me
Teach me a new kind of dancing
Tango with me
Set a woman free

Shadows

I saw it like I saw everything
That looked just like those nights
Just like those days
Inevitable
And moving slowly
Outside of my body

The darkness walked in on me again
A wave of dark seduction
That I know like the back of my hand

There were two this time
Like shadows cast over the room
And all of a sudden
I become aware of my curves
And ashamed

I pulled up my shirt
And made sure that my pants
Were tied as tight as I could
Maybe a string could keep someone out of my pants
For once

You won't get me
And I know no one will protect me
So let me be

Let me be
Because I swore once upon a time
That I would never scream
Never again
The death curdling sound of innocence being stolen
Again

Not again
Never again

I've seen the same scene
Over and over again
Just different people
And another place

Don't take this away
I know deep down
That I have to deserve more
Then torn clothes
And broken dreams

Don't take that away from me

But the scene played out
Perfectly

My only defense was the death grip
Of my thighs begging not to be pulled apart
Again

And pulling my shirt up as quickly as I could
As they were
Taking as they pleased
Like soldiers in a conquered city

And when they finally had enough
I watched them go
Looked back at the fallen city
Left in rubble and ash

That was my shame

My shame