So Don't Cry

All My Loving, I'll Send to You

I officially love you. This isn’t a new discovery, or anything to marvel over really. It’s just a fact that is—something simple, something easy, something honest. We all know how much I love honesty. I can’t deny it. The truth is apparently my best friend, sitting comfortably on my lips. I won’t lie if you ask me this question, I won’t tell you something to make it better, or disguise how I’m feeling right now. I wear my secrets sewn snugly into my sleeve, resting atop my wrist, waiting for you to see them.
So I love you, for everything I’ve seen and everything I know. And it’s been hard to keep it quiet with my honest mouth on fire. I’ve called and written and sent you all the notes I can write with trembling fingers. When you don’t respond, I’ll try again, too afraid to give up.
I love you; it’s easy, now that I know how perfect it is to do so. I love you, from the moment I let myself, in that instant sort of love you kind of way. Your charms are enough to pull me in, and I’m pulled. And even when we move through phases of insecurities and moments of uncertainties, I won’t stop—I can’t stop, you’ve tangled me around your finger, and I can’t let go. I love you, despite it, this unfailing, foolish love. Unwavering, and sometimes unwanted. No matter what you do, however you act, I will love you still. I will fight for your happiness, I will fight for our love, but I will not fight you.
Love like this has left me before, broken and silenced by those who refuse to accept it. But nevertheless I love. What has happened to me that I can find it, unwavering inside of a heart so broken the bloods spilled on the floor, what has caused me to see the best in the people who tend to hurt me the most? What has allowed me to allow myself the pain, to let go of the fear, and love despite the sadness I’ll eventually endure? I know on some level you don’t love me, not the way that I do. I need you more than you will ever need someone’s love like mine. I know someday you will leave me, hanging on words I pray you don’t mean, but maybe you always will. I know this and yet, despite my mind’s warning, I put my heart on my sleeve, next to my secrets, waiting for you to see it. Waiting for you to take it. Waiting for you to break it. Hand it back with all the pieces, please, and leave me the needle and thread.
I love you, in these moments still, when I know someday I’ll miss your loving the way I’ll miss my ability to.

December 9, 2007
Author's Note: for everyone I love this unconditional, foolish, uncontrollable love--my friends and more.;)

You'll Be the Only One to Make Them Go Away

I Want to Change the World

"It was just a man with something to prove--"

My favorite mug is the red one.
My favorite shirt the long-sleeved one.
My favorite person is an idea,
a theory, an interpretation.
Everybody is waiting for a cure
for something nobody really has yet.
Everybody is working toward the moment
when they can make themselves proud.
What is it we’re looking for if we’re looking f
or something? What is it we’re hoping for,
since we’re all hoping for something?

I’m dying to make something of these moments,
wrapped in blankets and ideas,
sipping cold coffee
too anxious to do something
about the taste.
New ideas don’t form in my head,
they’re all repetitions of the ones I’ve had.
Being unsuccessful in my plans to merge them,
being for the benefit of keeping myself alive,
keeping my mind in tune to what is happening
in my world—the places I wander when I’m out
of my mind—being for the sake of saving
my ambitions, I repeat the plans I’ve made,
over again, until they are concrete in theory
and abundant in imagination.
The coffee just gets colder,
the blanket just warmer,
the dogs still bark and planes fly over.
I’ve still made nothing of this moment.

My favorite animal: a turtle.
My favorite dream: a city.
My favorite idea: a person.
Still just a person.

"--slightly bored and severely confused."

Instead I Sleep

Be Gentle with Me

"I fought the war, I fought the war, I fought the war but the war won."

Everything has become political, everything a battle of wits and attrition—whose theory, whose idea, whose belief can out last the others. Who can win the war? The idea is either to be universal or conflicting. I am unsure which. Both have been used, both are excuses, one for the other. Either way, don’t all ideas strive to be utopian in product? All I can see are angry people, angry and striving for peace. Except that human nature is to be at odds. From experience, anger doesn’t generate pleasant utopian societies. Anger produces anger, fire fueling fire. And they say to fight the fires of opposition with yet more fire. But fire doesn’t defeat fire, two of the same does not water make. Fire fighting fire yields all the more fire. In that regard, fire is the all-consumer, its main consumption thought. How can this yield peace? Humans must just be creatures of self-destruction. Pyromaniacs—all of us. Doesn’t anyone believe in water? Isn’t anyone tired of the heat? Hasn’t anyone been burnt? Maybe we can’t notice the pain, too distracted with the display of flames. Not necessarily beautiful, but captivating nonetheless. We always did enjoy watching our fellow man fall. Or, burn, I suppose, as the case may be.

“Stop for the love of God.”
December 4, 2007
'Cause My Heart Gets Broken So Easily.

We Push and Pull

Rachel is Enough Already. It's Boring.

I spend my life writing odes to new beginnings. Handing out glory and sense of self and gratification. Everything is a pledge, everything is a devotional, everything for the purpose of self proposition. I’m tired of planning, I’m tired of pledging, I’m tired of advice and inspiration, I’m tired of attempting to force motivation through words. I’m tired of listening to myself speak, pushing myself forward; repairing what damage has been done. And why does it all have to be so cliché?
Am I self-destructive or stitching up old wounds? Or am I simply neither. Somewhere in between. Cutting open the sutures and pulling the flesh back together with strings coated in motivational, inspirational, self-propelling words.
Have I stitched the holes closed, or have I left them in my heart; am I still bleeding?
When something rips, it leaves a hole. But when it falls apart all together, you can somehow rework it, put it back together, so that no holes show through. It’s still broken, still tattered, still technically in pieces. But the holes are missing, filled in, shut by two busted portions stitched together again.
If I’m taking the time to write out all the things I say in my head, all the ways I’ll fix my heart, all the ways I pull my life back together—if I’m bothering to repeat myself on a daily basis, am I really suturing the wounds, or am I holding the bloody pieces, searching for my string? Or am I simply reversing all the work I’ve done, cutting and stitching, slicing and sewing. Each line over, each stitch altered, each suture becoming straighter and smaller with each pass of the needle. Each scar bleeding, healing, scaring again.

December 3, 2005
And I Fall Down Sometimes

All I Want is a Heart

New rooms—unfamiliar;
and faces to match people to.
New ideas that fill the dents
in the road like puddles to plow through.
All the old things are growing
dark, like memories, faded around the edges.
And all the new things are piling up
on top, on top, on top,
one above the other.
Houses aren’t homes and home
has no heart; and the cable’s going out—
flashing on, flashing off, void of snow
or white noise. Nothing feels like comfort,
nothing feels like safe,
everything is a mystery
like new shoes and a new city.
Like new friends, who hardly know
any history or plans.
Everything is familiar, but nothing
is the same; nothing is familiar, but everything
has changed.
And I am stuck inside myself
for the duration of the day.
I’m wandering the rooms I’ve left
unfamiliar in my head.
It’s time to open up their doors,
expand into them; move all my
baggage from the crowded spaces
I’ve used and even out my head.


“Come now,
come
and mourn me.
It’s so easy
now I’m gone.”

The rain has made the lawns like swaps
and has left my heart hoping for more.
Walking through the yard has become
like trudging through mud,
grass is ankle deep and growing
with the increase of precipitation.
The only things I want are
to feel more at home in this suburban wildernessand
to not have to shake mudded water from my feet.
I miss the smell of concrete and steam,
the sound of sirens past midnight,
the jolt of trains stopping and going,
moving across the tracks with rough sparks
and no hesitation.
I miss the people who made that city my home.
I miss their energy, their honesty,
the feeling that we were true friends—
despite all the [fake ones] we encountered.
And I miss being able to laugh without needing to,
without having to smile to keep my spirits lifted.
The coffee, the cold air, the coats, the strolls,
the train rides for no reason, the adventures
that were ours.
People think I am strong, because it’s raining
and I smile.
What they can’t see are my hollowed-out insides,
and that I am happy just to not be sad.


To Feel Something Beating Against My Chest