Under

I love the new york city subway. Now you guys who are just here for the evening, the weekend, or a business trip may think I'm crazy but in all the time I've spent here its one of the places that I feel the safest. In between intermittent glances exchanged by strangers, this time is the only time when new yorkers have time to breathe. Now the air may not breath with the freshness of california's majestic coastline, but it breaths real. It breathes the blood sweat and tears of a single mother in light blue scrubs who spends her whole day nursing everyone else back to heath that she cannot find time for her own. This city breeds an infinite number of the struggling. struggling artists, struggling lovers, struggling mothers, struggling husbands and struggling brothers. Its one of the only places you'll find new yorkers with their guard down. Strangers sit within inches of each other unified in one goal. Just get me home. Underground, the perils of the rest of the world stop. You can't get us. You can't text, tweet, email, call, bbm, IM, ghat or facebook me. You.can't.touch.me. The burdens that resurface when I hit ground level are temporarily at ease. The stress is gone because for the six stops between here and Carroll street the world does not exist. And should I be so lucky to hear the, "ladies and gentleman we are delayed because of train traffic ahead of us" I know I've stolen a few more minutes for my mind to be still. Be still. Be still with an ipod that is connected to nothing and just listen. Listen with every morsel of your being. You'll hear things in that "I am old fashioned" arrangement you didn't know were there and that, for the final time will have proven john coletrain's residence amongst the best. Read. Read a real book. Pause. Look around. And the look condescendingly at the hipster elitism that resides in the 9 kindles on your car alone because you just so happen to be going into brooklyn. Feel the pages, the grainy texture of a modern library classic creased four times at the most telling places that you can't wait to get to. Ingest every word as though it is a part of your diet that you cannot be without; for missing it means you would not have made you daily nutritional requirements. Feel the authors brush strokes as he paints the image that will continue to evolve with every page. "The artist is a creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim". Oscar Wilde's starting blocks to a journey to two hundred and sixty six pages of freedom from my own skin. Damn. "Please stand clear of the closing doors". Above ground. I'm me again.

dismantled.

yeah i do. i love you. and with all of me, i stand here wanting to
beleive you when you say "I've never stopped loving you." see, since
we haven't been together i've used these words like razors cutting the
insides of my inner thighs just to make sure I could still feel. For
every word you've spent trying to bribe my confidence back onto being
there, is a depiction far from fiction engrained in my mind. so for
every word used to console me, there is an empty warehouse in Brooklyn
between my two best friends houses that collected the five hundred and
forty six thousand three hundred sixty seven tears from emotions you
chose to leave unaddressed. adjacent, there is the feeling of looking
at you, hoping youd look at me with a morsel of the pride your eyes
once held. Its sits on a shelf next to the seven days a week by eight
months coming to two hundred and forty days that i asked you to lay
next to me only for you to look at me like you had forgotten that you
loved me and walk away... every time. Next to that there are the
three thousand four hundred and fifty eight memories of me wanting you
to talk to me, to let me in long enough to remember that a year ago,
you thought you wanted to marry me. How after knowing you for eleven
years and loving you for four could you have let so many days pass
that i couldn't remember what my sense of touch felt like. why, month
after month after month after month could i not remember what it felt
like to sleep next to the man that i love. how did you not see me cry?
every day. every week. for weeks. i could not remember what it felt
like for you to take my hand in yours. i could not remember your lips.

at the end of it all i knew. i opened my soul to you and let you carry
it. i opened my chest, peeled back every single one of my ribs and
laid my heart in your hands. I have never wanted to know what another
mans skin felt like. my love is irrational. It is blind and
unrelenting. Unyielding & glaringly true. so i bear this hurt in my
words and revisit these words as they point to you. And i'm forced to
acknowledge that the only time i've been able to feel...was with you.

and still. on you. i give up. i cannot be dismantled again.

forlorn lovers, maybe

My heart is weak. I've been forced to secure beams with which structures of the stature of the colleseam were built, to reenfource the once fierce walls of my heart. Those beams now hold up the dissillusioned fears of not being wanted by the man who used to tell me he loved me. The misnomer that I, for being called something other than a woman was not of the caliber I am. Those beams have been built upon every lie and false promise that was sowed by a relationship that I poured my world into. I used to breathe for you. I am a woman who has no place for limiting love. I did not know there was a place for limits until you put them there. My heart beats plentifly. Like petals in a rose guarden, there is enough love in my heartbeats to bring a smile to each of those who stops long enough to recognize it. Its seeps difficult love, the love that once reached only knows to plateau at unconditional. There is nothing before and nothing after. It is the original feeling with its truth unequivocally stated in feeling.

Forlorn lovers. Or maybe that was just me.

why do i forget

Why do I keep testing waters that never stopped burning me? How can It be that everything you've done to destroy me I've forgotten so easily. Do if forget because of a genuine belief that things have changed of as a defense mechanism allowing me to forget what I've endured? Do I believe in people? Do I believe in me?

Blow Smoke

They blow smoke at me like I'm tryna get high from they're blunt. The hot air laiden with corporate jargon and promises of success Really have only one measure success. "how much did they like to hear themselves talk?" Their words function like THC crystallized at the bottom of dime bags and shook out to make sure inhaled. These fallible words get inhaled by unassuming youth wide eyed and capable and lift spirits or at least provide the promise of lifted spirits at a later date due to some unquantifiable success just long enough to think that shit is actually real. Until you eat your way out of the Their high. only to realize that if at least you were really high, you would have left your current mindset satisfied with the departure of hunger from your stomach. These words leave you with much less. They leave you with the idea that you may actually be a part of a structure that works but as it stands, it doesn't. Its broken and fragmented like the shattered glass on the blind street corner where your dreams were blindsided by this place that continues to rip you of your strength. The day to day deprivation of the drive and passion that once pulsed through my veins is replaced by indifference and forfeit. The acknowledgment of these newcomers is crushing. Run.