stand up and see the lights.

sometimes my mind opens before my throat does,
when i feel like i have something to say but i lack the guts to say it,
when fear holds my jaw closed like a muzzle
it backfires all the way to my brain,
you make it hard to think sometimes,
hell you make it hard to walk,
my feet are nailed to the ground as if this earth were a coffin threatening to bury me alive,
like some breathless lover refusing to let her other go even though holding on hurts the most,
the way i held onto my dreams and hung them in the halls of myself that i never let anyone in, a funeral home with walls white-washed so bright i could look at them and see my reflection, count the bones inside my rib cage and marvel at how they could hold your body so close but forget to hold my heart in.
 i wanna forget what it feels like to hold on, to feel every inch of this universe coursing through my broken skin, my eye sockets so full of water from the world that they forget to hold it in, i want to let it go, 
to raise my fist like david did when he first looked at goliath,
i am no giant but some days my dreams are
somedays my grudges are like the iceberg that sunk titanic
sometimes my fingertips turn white from all the times i clench my fist
like it held onto something more than air
like i remembered there was oxygen inside my lungs instead of empty space
and if oxygen pushes its way through my chambers and makes words
my whole body is a manifesto
and my voice is the only thing that reads it
the only way it will ever be heard
like the love letter i buried six feet under when i realized that you don’t need me the way that i need you so i fell in love with the letters i could speak instead of the ones i had to listen to that unfurled from your perfect lips like a white flag stained blood red
i can’t put doves inside these missiles and pretend my heart’s at peace,
i’m all torn up inside
like newly turned soil i don’t know how to make anything grow yet,
you don’t know how to wield a shovel and half the time you wind up knocking me over instead of standing me up
my feet are shaking and i don’t know if i have any bones yet that haven’t been broken like my heart, i am a plaster cast of someone that i used to hold inside myself,
i am relearning my gentleness and pouring peace into my cracks like
the first moment when the sun cuts the horizon and makes you feel like there is no line between earth and sky, you pick a star cut into the heavens and hold it to your chest though it burns like an ember it makes you feel whole
but i am tired of scalding my fingers on your comet tail,
i am tired of catching up to your side of the story that started way before we met,
i’m not asking for new beginnings
i am asking for release, i am pleading with arms open that this world will hold me gently,
i spent so many times rebuilding myself that i never found my roots,
i have put down my chisel and begged you for a paintbrush that will make this marble heart a softer thing to touch, i have let you run your fingers over all my hidden cracks and pull the words out from between so when the coroner touches my body it will crumple into consonants and vowels,
the things that i had to say to me, to you,
the scaffolding of cartilage i built myself around with all my secrets bound inside
so when they ask you how i died
tell them i went slow,
tell them i lost my voice.

there’d be no distance that could hold us back.

if i believe in a shelter stronger than a thousand storms i will be a hand for you to hold. on days when i wake up feeling like someone else, i write myself into every poem i create to remind myself to breathe even when oxygen feels like lighter fluid and my lungs are a box of matches.

somedays we find ourselves on fire and the ghost towns in our chests are cracked open as if we were grave robbers who knew that stealing time could never seriously be called a crime,

we are vagrants who know only how to walk from here to there with hands entwined but that is something, i could never be called graceful but your eyes are the music when my hips begin to sway, when my heart was an empty beach your first glance was the wave that knocked me on my feet and made drowning feel like ecstasy.

i forget to breathe sometimes but on most nights i feel like laughing is better for my anyway, the syllables of our merriment stitched together with the threads of a thousand hard nights and harder days, empty pockets and holes in our shoes that we wore anyway because all we wanted to do was run, when the sun fell down heavy on our heads we drowned the daylight in a cheap bottle of wine and spent the weekend kissing our cares away like they were nothing,

maybe they are. when the first light breaks and i forget to breathe because there’s sunshine kissing your forehead everything else seems small, like i could carry your whole world in the palm of my hand that has felt far too much for my heart to take.

we have two minutes left before the universe combusts and leaves us starstruck, i wandered outside without my shoes on and found you cupping the stars in your hands like they were water, i found an ocean full of meaning that fell out of the sky and washed me to your arms and left me breathless, fireworks reflecting the light that bled out from your soul when we watched the world go up in flames we knew it only meant beginnings,

sometimes the hardest part of growing is the start because you don’t know if you’ll make it till you get there or if there’s a ‘there’ to get to but i don’t think it matters where you end up if your footprints go in pairs and your grip stays strong, interlace your fingers like they were the last thing left and all your heartbeat needed to go on was another heart that needed it

close your eyes before the free fall when the world bottoms out

catch each other

at the bottom we will hold each other up.

discarded or collected.

i met you at the start of a new year that i held like a newly hatched bird the palm of my hand, overwhelmed with life and bursting with potential. you opened the gate to my backyard like you were opening up prison bars and i swear you left the promise of new growth where your footfalls fell, soft but heavy leaving me shaken like i’d dropped every last dime piece into your wishing well hoping to get something more than empty words that spilled like water from your lips, words that left me thirsty like i’d fallen for every line you’d said but only because you fell for them too, like you didn’t know whether it was me or yourself you were trying to convince but the act wasn’t over and you never leave things unfinished. i never wanted to watch another chick flick with you, but I did. maybe it was because we thought the lead actress was cute or maybe because we wanted to postpone the inevitable ache of questions we couldn’t answer because we asked them with our souls instead of our mouths. when the credits rolled  after the last kiss i felt a sign i didn’t recognize unfold from some space in my heart newly opened that i didn’t know i had. you bruise my heart sometimes without knowing it, like the irises in your eyes that i hoped would never tell me a lie, when i kissed you it seemed like a promise to my foolish heart that i would never be lonely again, but that’s a stupid promise that i strung like a suit of chain mail around your neck, there’s nothing wrong with being lonely or gathering hope from the stars like they were cornfields we could harvest with our finger tips, and i hold onto that, to the waves of hope i caught bouncing from every antenna on every night i turned my radio up so loud i thought my ears would rupture in a haze of colored sound, the way my heart felt like popping when you laid your head down next to mine, i didn’t want to fall for you, i only wanted to make you laugh, more than anything i wanted to chase away the shadows that hung from your shoulders. i wanted to be the charlie brown that brought you the worst christmas tree in the lot and still found something worth keeping hidden in its branches because that’s just the way we roll, in the string of lies that the culture hangs around our throats like daisy chains the most poisonous is the one that tells us to get our shit together, i bought every petal growing on every stalk of weeds that choked my heart knowing all the while that i didn’t want to take care of you, that makes me feel too old.
besides, I know you could take care of yourself if you believed it, but now I’m so washed up I’ve lost any words worth saying and I can’t convince either of us that we will be okay, I don’t want to share this poem with you but I know that I will because it is the only time I feel like I have made something worth keeping when you tell me that it’s good god damn, I believe you. Some days my heart feels so heavy I leave it on the staircase for some stranger to find, hoping for some fresh start in a house that smells like new paint, but the splinters of your sadness still sneak through like the monument of some past love that left you bruised, just like us all and I beg god some days to take it all away because I don’t want to live feeling like my chest is an open chasm and my heart is a swinging door, I never wanted you to take up residence in these halls because I knew you’d leave me broken when you left paint peeling from my walls as the last echo of why you swore was a Rembrandt masterpiece but all I have are 50 cents for brushes and one dime piece and I can’t make anything you ever thought was worth keeping. yet still i call myself a sculptor some days, knowing that i will chip away at the walls around your heart like i was michelangelo and you were david who could be brought home with the removal of all of this stone. some days i doubt my strength and my fingers shake with fear, when we will ourselves with the terror of possibility we tremble at the idea of making something worth keeping but wrap your hand in mind and wield this hammer even on days when it hurts, we will build on the promise that tomorrow will be better.

i could see for miles.

the feel of another stare on my back cracked against me like the sound of a baseball hitting a bat but it was you who crumpled underneath it, when i bent to pick up the pieces of your heart i saw wine red in your eyes like blood, we grow tired of breaking but hold on for the rebirth.
today is the day i run out of words.
society creates the halls we walk through but i find that my feet are sometimes glued to the ceiling and everything is upside down. it holds me down heavy sometimes, like i know that my tongue will trip as often as my feet because these shoes are too big for me to fill, there is an iron weight within my stomach with chains that snake through every corner of my mind
know that i hold on to the nights we become planets, as if some light sparked from god himself had flung us into orbit and made satellites of our eyes, there are a thousand lost souls looking upward in the hope that some missed connection will find its way through this mess we’ve made,  believing that there is more than this hell will propel us forward like a rocket ship destroying all of our past fears and leaving us better than the things we’ve left behind and buried underneath the corners of the sky, you are an eclipse of the sun that i forgot to miss when it was gone, you left me gaping wide like windows open to an empty house where the light still shines, and i believe it’ll keep shining when we move on from here,
know that this moment is almost gone and that the morning will make things over like there are roads that we’ve never even seen that will take us farther than we dreamed, when we gather up the shrapnel from our hopes that went all wrong they’ll fit together better, like the callouses in our palms combined us into something better than our parts
 our thoughts rush like a freight train that threatens to destroy all the distance we have crossed but there are stronger hands at the engine pushing you through this, though you sometimes forget, there is a fuel box inside your ribcage where your hope breathes life into the coals tied to your hear,. there is a key in the corner of your eye that unlocks the pattern of my thoughts and lays them out for me like open road, though i have always been afraid of open spaces i cannot make myself enclosed, our laughter is the wind that brings the promise of tomorrows and a future that forgives us for our crimes both spoken and unspoken, it takes a long time to let go of wrongs we won’t acknowledge but it takes nothing at all to watch them float away and lift us upward
i am my harshest critic and i know you are the same but in a moment of inspiration we dived off of a cliff of self-doubt into the ocean that submerged us like the milky way and took away our sorrows, cast off our self-made anchors and left us with a promise that we will live for better days
believe that hell will stay far removed from us and heaven itself will flourish within the empty spaces in our skeletons
our bones knit together in a cathedral
that stands in the middle of the town that once knocked us over backward but now knows only peace.

some things are worth bruising for.

you were a creature of velocity

quantity, not quality is what occupied your mind,

a machine composed of all there is to do.

you move mindlessly, churning blank pages forward

because you are afraid to spill your thoughts on paper,

afraid to slow down and face the light

reflected in this prism you’ve created.

you are a robot man, a creature of iron will and you can force

your way through anything but not through everything

because there are some battles that you won’t face—

close that door and walk away and don’t even pretend

you once saw beauty in that face because you are a creature of doing,

not feeling, production, not inflection.

i skipped stones on the lake that day,

the same day i skipped past the introduction and cut

right to the kiss

because i am a creature of believing, not doubting,

feeling, not re-routing.

but you are a robot man and all of my belief cannot turn you into flesh and bone

you are unbreakable and i am not and i’ve learned to become alright with that

to let the wind sound through these hollow spaces in my soul

because what else is it but the sound of music filling emptiness?

i skipped past the exit signs inside your eyes, the flashing lights that warned me

not to enter and with both hands on the steering wheel i veered inside your bloodstream

and swam through your veins

and you were intoxicating, the feel of your heartbeat like opium to my troubled mind

but there were some places that not even my fingertips could reach

because you are a robot, man,

and i am not. and all your batteries and metal parts are things that i can’t clasp with

my warm fingers, ice cold you break away and leave me

breathing, not laughing.

realizing, not reacting.

but i know now that it was enough for me to sail your coasts and watch the sunrise,

to beat against the prison walls around your heart

but it is you, not i that is the captive and so i turn away

another step to ring the bell to sound the nell of deaths cold sting

for there is no heartbeat left to summon life into the chasm of your being.

but you can do anything —

or else you could, you told me once

you are a robot man, a cold hard steel man

but i am not, and never will be

and two things never change,

men and their machines

who we are and what we create

i turned off the lights and left you in the room,

your mouth still churning out blank pages,

every unspoken word another space to fill the distance between

me and you,

the robot man.

lift those heavy eyelids.

i’m tired of the bullets we all carry in our backpacks and of our tendency to shoot the messengers and the ones who are different. because really i just want to know you in all of your complexities but there are hand grenades hidden in the promises we make as we swear we’ll never destroy each other i begin to doubt that it is true because all i’ve ever believed was different than this, i once swore i was a princess but my daddy never did remind me of that dream; but he did leave me with a suitcase full of boulders, weighing me down with all i never was for him but today i leave that behind and watch these stones turn into sparrows lighting my way with lanterns in their beaks, feathers just beyond my fingertips reminding me of more, reminding me that the words we speak are more than words when they rise up off these pages and become a part of us, it is a life-giving work that we humans do. and so i dedicate this one to you, the one whose dreams may never come true because hell, at least you have your dreams and that is something. at least your eyes still close at night and open upon paradise, in the hallowed corners of your mind you still have hope for more, a vision of all that could be illuminated by the electric beating of your heart inside your chest. and i will love you forever for the words that you own, both spoken and unspoken. the syllables behind your eyelashes contain the greatest speech i’ve ever heard and i promise you tonight that i won’t let these wolves tear your happiness away, i’ll hold you like a lover till the morning breaks upon us and finds our consonants and vowels intertwined and something like a sunrise hovering in the space between our lips, our messages nothing but words of wonder and the bullets in our backpacks exchanged for empty shells. there’s nothing wrong with being different, darling. there’s nothing wrong with wonder.

just leave me your stardust to remember me by.

i sent you my heart in a box,
the postman promised to have you sign
on the dotted line
before entrusting it to you
but maybe he forgot
or maybe he just decided that it wasn’t worth the time
but either way i’m here
and you are there
in this age of television blues and artificial coloring shot with needles
into our artificial conversations
i could tell you that i miss you but my words would come up empty
because anyone can say them
and it doesn’t really mean much
i remember when our words turned into touch
and i could feel the ache of all the things you couldn’t say
compressed into the space between your fingers and your breath
that lit the darkness sparking daylight into the street lamps
of these broken asphalt creeks
each dotted yellow line another sign of just how far away from me you are
and i can’t make myself pretend
that this is right and this is easy
and when did simple become so complicated
and when did all the right sayings become so cheesy
and those three words became the preface
to sweaty palms and cold dead hearts
because the kind of love i look for isn’t artificial love
the love that becomes cancer, eating away at us like
 boys and girls becoming the masters of each others hearts
 turning beating organs into tools of mass destruction
 when did we step away from all that we became
running back into ourselves
into the things that we forgot
into things we promised in our darkest dimmest hours that we would never  be.
why is it so easy to take off our clothes
and so much harder to open our hearts?
or maybe they are one and the same
our silence screaming
“know me and love me because of it
or maybe despite it.
hold my hand with all it scars and all its battle wounds
the outside signs of all that we have overcome
because hearts can’t scar
the same way palms do,”
the way your hands shook the day you let go of my heart
and let me on my own and told me it was better
and told me i was stronger than i thought
but these are things i knew already
things i felt when my heart beat steady
and words came easy, when my feet found rhythm
on the sidewalks of your shoes, my heart all tied up in your laces
and the sun illuminating both our freckled faces.
those were the days before fear swept in on the back of a
tv commercial promising love and selling promises
the day before you left me that note in shaky handwriting,
“i can’t know you and love you the same”,
when the red sunrise became the color of my
beating heart flayed raw and aching,
when i scooped the fragile remnants into a cardboard box,
addressed it to your name and made the postman promise.
the weeks turned months where i pressed my face against the
windowpane and waited for your answer,
then realized that the silence was your answer
and maybe we are all just cardboard boxes
holding aching bleeding hearts
stamped over again with the places we’ve seen
and the people we’ve known, pasted with those little signs that tell us
“handle with care”
but who listens to those? not me.
i left my heart in a cardboard box in the postman’s hands
and maybe someday he’ll show up on your doorstep and ask you to sign
but you’d better know it is a great responsibility
because hearts don’t just break,
sometimes they heal.

on valentines day:

“Be loved. Be known. Love people and know people. Be so brave as to raise a hand for help when you need it. Make friends and make sure they know they matter. Be loyal to them and fight for them. Remind them what’s true and invite them to do the same when you forget. If you do some losing or you walk with someone else in their defeat, live with dignity and grace. It is a middle finger to the darkness.” — jamie tworkowski