[x]

a guide to her sadness.her wrists are wishbones she breaks for luck,
not knowing there is no luck in the break.
her veins are unanswered prayers
her lungs an apology sent as letters to heaven,
hoping God will forgive her for being a continual disappointment.
her head is a phonebooth for all the thoughts nobody's picking up on.
see,
the the sadness is sinking her again.
so when she leaves at midnight to longboard to the ocean,
go with her.
when she tries to climb bridges,
don't let her.
when she's drinking cold tea and playing daughter,
it means she's trying to pull her head together.
when she's in the bathroom praying to the toilet,
decide to knock.
when she avoids you,
hide her blades.
because lately,
she doesn't have the will to fight anymore.
so on the bad days, fight for her.

confessionalthey say sad girls change their hair color
and forgive their monsters.

i change my morals
and become one.

001 i am a whirlwind of
bruised knees
(purple)

an aching heart
(dark blue)

twisted guts
(red)

&
a regret that could
crumble mountains.
(green-green-green)

white noise.sometimes i turn off the greasy yellow lights and run the water lava hot.
the quiet porcelain is an untouched coffin
familiar as the look in your eyes.
i can hear my heart beat in my ears
and i stare at the ceiling until it darkens and blurs at the edges.
my body is heavy as lead
i cannot remember the weight of movement.
sometimes the closest i can get is the suicide between each breath
and the apology unspoken on the inhale.
my skin is a ladder i keep climbing,
i can see through the rungs to the fat cells that weigh down my bones.
sometimes,
my hand becomes his when it creeps uninvited over the landscape of my body
and across the staircase of my ribs.
i can't erase the feeling of his body pressed like a book
over my flower.
my head is white noise that bleeds red,
but i'm tired of all the blood.
tired of all the memories like channels
i keep flicking past.
sometimes i wonder if i cut enough slack in my skin,
&

truthsi.

there are 2 things that not even the most
forceful of rains can cleanse me of:

-memories
-mistakes

ii.

sometimes, i feel like a caged lion.
only with a lot more impatience
and a lot less resilience.

iii.

i have yet to discover what it means to be content.
i am either too stagnant or too fluid.
no middle ground.

iv.

i have mastered the art of leaving.
it's the idea of moving on that still haunts me.

v.

i fear that the light in my eyes is so dim that it will burn out
before even i have a chance to see the world with it.

vi.

i am not as clever as i pretend to be.

vii.

someone needs to teach me that
i don't need reassurance; i

starsi pray that someday soon, in a lonesome winter, your bones will cease to ache.
regrets will no longer break your morals like glass figurines,
you will not ask God to pardon your sins.
you will forgive yourself.

i hope, for your sake, that your butterfly-flutter eyes
will only be dampened with tears worthy of shedding.
your glory will shine out of those 2 crystal windows
and you will finally know what freedom feels like.

one day, in the midst of a dreary december, i wish for your wings to open wide
and carry you to heights far past any you have ever experienced.
your lungs will become blooming forests
with snippets of poetry carved into

eight things that hurt more than a broken boneone,
i have never had broken bones,
but i imagine it would snap,
splinter, pierce my skin.

i imagine it would be
the pieces i cannot put back together
scratching their way out of
this body bag.

i imagine my demons would
not rest until my arms are torn
by the claws of my inside.

i'd imagine broken bones
would not hurt as much
as broken confidence,
conviction, trust.

two,
her faith.
(my lack of it.)

three,
fluctuating positions in life.
the backbone of a dreamer
who finds nightmares her companion,
the fingertips of a mother,
pressed against feverish foreheads.
the lips of a teenage girl,
forgetting what truth sounds like.

four,
bones h

i would say my father is a wari would say my father is a war horse but that is a failed symbol
because he has been dragged through the dirt as many times as this metaphor

i want to write in abstract like in a book of
contemporary poetry i bought over the summer;
it was all syllables and lines of 'talk talk talk' repeated over and over
i want to write something that describes how i feel without saying a word that describes it -
like:
dust and ache and tired and bone and overflowing and lonely and fuck and .

i want to write poems that have meaning without being cliche i want poems
that defy grammar and space and time because when someone reads them, they become me

slingshot words.there are a million worlds living in your head
begging to be wrapped around your tongue and released like a slingshot
into the heart of some stranger you may never meet.

calamity.the poor boy got a lecture from deaths secretary
"deaths busy enough as it is without walk ins"
"but it was urgent," he stutters.
"it couldn't wait, it was now or never"
he was simply told
"take a number, and wait over there with the rest
who 'couldn't wait' "

wasting time.already,
i have spent too many nights with metal kissing flesh,
too many nights just one step above empty air.
there are too many unwritten suicide notes in my head,
too many hours spent praying to a toilet that will never answer back 'thin enough'.
i have wasted my 18th year curled around too much sadness,
spending it in texts sent like stones i never should have thrown.
words i never should have let fall out of the unhinged socket of my mouth.
i am all helium and no balloon.
i have spent my problems lavishly,
i was a whore with my secrets.
i forgot how to fall apart quietly.
i fell asleep in depression loud as the thoughts in your head.
i let it settle in my bones but tried to dig it out by cutting deeper.
i learned healing is a meal i haven't learned to swallow yet,
and i am grieving something i haven't found.
my innocence is a book i never got to read,
a book he burned before i was old enough to say no.
i can feel my scars raised like white flags,
each valley a war won.
maybe they

072i ached enough that day
to salt the atlantic ocean
three time over

Ruthyou were tired and stagnant with your
bones piercing through your skin.
your body was a war zone.

black & purple bruises splashed across you
like blood on the concrete of the place you
could never call home. your parched mouth
& crooked little-girl teeth were never sanctuary.

the innocence was brutally beaten out of you
until you were brittle.

you lived in Germany your first 6 years
and then moved to Latvia.
you existed in a place they called a ghetto.

that dual-triangle on your left arm defined you.
it was the reason your scabbed lips couldn't
whisper prayers to the heavens, begging God
to save you from the mean men.

you were 8 when

bad days.on my bad days,
i open notebooks like bibles and hold pens like lifelines.
i keep opening the book of my memories
just to see if it still leaves a bruise.
tonight,
i am covered in the bruises of your hand
tonight,
your ghost is in my bed. i can't sleep there,
so again-
again i find myself miles from home
wishing on stars i can't see
and spitting memories into the ocean like watermelon seeds.
i sit on my longboard like driftwood and send my shivers into texts
like letters i never should have mailed.
on my bad days,
i wear cuts like ropeburn,
like i just don't know when to let go.
i get lost inside the sadness and hold tea thats long since gone cold
as hours escape like small birds set free.
i forget to open the blinds
and paint my fingernails black
and stare at the too-big numbers aligned on the scale i can't stop stepping on.
my th

tear the skeleton from his comfortzonei want to build a skyscraper, seventeen stories high
and fill each floor with a story from the people who never said goodbye.

i.
a middle child, born in 1994,
she always wanted to be loved the most
until she learned how to give a blowjob
in an alley behind Miss China’s Takeaway
at knife point.

ii.
she lost her childhood
to an ocean who always thought it was small
and never stopped pushing its borders.

iii.
he’s not sure how he’s supposed to live without her.
staring at the closed coffin, he loses the ability to want to.

iv.
it’s not fair, she thinks,
that the house creaks when she’s trying to sleep,
but when

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melancholy milesi.

i wish i could put your wonders into words.
your breath, hot and heavy on my face, melts away my skin
until you are evaporating my cheekbones into a beautiful cracked sculpture of vogue.

ii.

my insides are pressurized with you but somehow, my will power
leaked its way out of my ear, out of my lips
onto the floor
but we don't mind because we are young and a little bit battered,
and free will is overrated anyway.

iii.

i lift the thin fabric to my nose and inhale, deep
as if there is nothing between us -

you are the blanket
and you are holding me.

iv.

the sincerity in your arms forces the past out of me until i'm not a c

absentthere is a difference between
being alone & being lonely;
you have shown me both.

my fingers grew 2 sizes over the span of
4 winters; you proved that the only thing
lonelier than the number 1 is me
in my 17 years of glory & pride
and being stubborn.

we are long walks and pain marks
and it aches me to think that i am
nothing but breath to you while you
are my whole fucking oxygen supply.
i rested my head on a cloud bed for
4 years, coloring myself outside
the lines to get your attention -

i should've known you've always been organized.

prim and proper and ready to break the bones
out of any passerby daring enough to call

enslave yourselfi am not radical enough to own my body.
the universal soul watches me spit on soil
and martyr my morals for ignorance's sake.

my ribs don't curve into a smile in my chest;
no, my insides are grimaced and my spine isn't
straight like Spanish language.

i am a z.

z like too sharp to be an s - s like my dulled senses
on spirituality - z like a paint smear the artist won't
work with like a white scratch on a purple canvas,
i am purple too; our childhood like a haze of orange
and sticky fingers and the blood rush of advice we
might actually take to heart.

(my heart is nonexistent)

my kneecaps kneel on salt granules until my skin

royal mistakeyour bones speak a language my tongue hasn't learned yet.
they are bitter, from crown to toe-curls; you are bitter and
bent out of shape. you are no royalty, just a common man
building his wall of bricks but you pedestalize yourself
amongst the highest of crowds; the dieties and Gods watch
as you adorn yourself in ill-gotten robes of shimmering gold.

the angels observe in understandable offense as you remove
the cloak of vulnerability and the past, replace it with diamond
studs and p(r)etty fluff as if your children are an audience.

you have become a skeleton in your 50 years, you have become
a skeleton. a dismantled pile of fle

aquaticsi am trying not to let you flood my insides; no such luck.
we are 2 separate rafts on opposite sides of the sea that
share the same fleet and no matter how hard we try to
find each other in the depths of these waters, the waves
just drift us apart.

(you are in everything you belong with me everywhere you
are my everything you have my everything - i gave you it all -
you are everything)

my fingers are numb,
my God they are fucking numb with(out) you

and they ache.

i am aching all over, my fingers are pains, i am aching all over.
i am an a-c-h-e. my head, it pounds with memories and fantasies
and replays the time you laced y

bluntyou breathe me like a blunt; sharp and easy to identify like her perfume.
my tender cheekbones are smoke encircling your hairline like there really
is no tomorrow. we will learn soon that our shoulders are too heavy & my
words ramble and i am nothing.

in the calm reality of it all, i am nothing in the shape of a triangle meant to
be indecision; not quite a square yet but too scared to be a circle because
the echo of forever is the fucking scariest silence i've ever heard.

not now, maybe yesterday i was meant to hit & pass the way germany taught me.
we are not different we are not special we are not worthy. not not worthy like
unwo

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[x]

to the gunman of a school shooting in newtown, CT

by ~learningtobefree, Dec 14, 2012, 4:12:33 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

the black man on the television screen spits reform,
but parents of dead children plea gun control in the
wake of the destruction of 20 children, 26 lives total.

adam, don't you realize it's christmas time & these
parents will be burying bones instead of caroling songs?
the black man on the television screen admits:
our heart is broken.
but there is no beauty in the unity that follows robbing
of innocence. adam,

you sprayed the school with bullets bursting into shrapnel
off the shattering skulls of children.
20 little bodies hauled off in white sanitation bags,
stained red with crusty blood and shouting mothers screaming
to the heavens.

there is nothing clean about the way 26 connecticut families
will be washing the salt water off their chapped cheeks eternally.
you drained them internally. in america,
to know change you must create it, but we have
a cabinet full of ornate teacups not willing to
blow the dust off their porcelain edges.

you'd think we'd learn from our mistakes, but adam,
what you did was a mistake. my mother came home from work
and kissed me and told me she loved me,
just like the black man on the television screen said she would.
so now my question is - if the black man on the television screen
is such a fucking genius, then why didn't he see you coming?

you've walked this country's soil for 20 years, adam, and you
gunned down one aorta, one ventricle - childish coronaries for
every one of your birthday parties until you had 20 warm hearts
going cold in a mortician's bag.

i guess you were in the christmas spirit of giving, or rather,
not giving a shit because your 3 guns bore bullets that slit
kids in half. the black man on the television screen was crying
for you, adam, he was crying for you, we're all crying for you.

don't forget, you murdered your mother and 5 of her co-workers too.
children were rushed out of their safe zones in single-file lines,
grabbing each other's shoulders for support; teachers grappled with
the disaster of tears and a 5-year-old's blood-stained t-shirt.

adam, keep in mind for next time that any laundry detergent can
wash out blood, but the flood of tears following a school shooting
will never be enough to fill 20 empty chairs in a connecticut classroom,
yearning for the bodies that they once held so dearly.

to the gunman of a school shooting in newtown, CTby ~learningtobefree

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

things like this really upset me

note: this is an unedited work. i just needed to get it out.

~violetense Feb 19, 2013 Student Writer

Oh my God.
The letter format...brilliant.
Your imagery is so striking and it almost made me cry.

I love this.

~learningtobefree Feb 19, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

thank you so much(:

~catching-cinderella Feb 6, 2013 Student Writer

_{ohmygod. bam. your words went straight into my gut.}

~learningtobefree Feb 7, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

aw thank you c:

i think haha..

~nuisances Feb 4, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

_{I'm going to be honest and say nothing about the shooting has touched me quite like this did. Beautifully done.}

~learningtobefree Feb 5, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

omg thank you so so so much

!travelgirlxx Jan 16, 2013

This is perfectly said:

"you've walked this country's soil for 20 years, adam, and you
gunned down one aorta, one ventricle - childish coronaries for
every one of your birthday parties until you had 20 warm hearts
going cold in a mortician's bag."

~learningtobefree Jan 17, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

thank you, thank you

~Moonangellovers Dec 21, 2012

I don't get it why people use guns to hurt another person and then kill thousands. I mean weren't guns used to protect people? Not kill? Sure we used guns in the revolutionary war, but that was to protect our country from the british, sure we used guns in the civil war but that was to have slave rights for freedom.

But it was the mother's fault for having her guns laying about and taking her sons to a shooting range to protect themselves, she was afraid that she would be lonely after divorcement but it happens people can live by themselves and try to find a new man in their lives or woman.

Guns i'm saying should be used for hunting deers, and protecting farms. Not kill or anything.

~QuantumInnovator Dec 18, 2012

Thank you for putting Adam Lanza on the hook where he belongs, unlike all those people blaming Hollywood, video games, and popular culture instead of the evil monster who pulled the trigger.

Nobody likes being blamed for something they had nothing to do with, including Samuel L. Jackson. Also, I am not aware of any video/computer game that allows you to kill children.

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