I Am More

I am more
than the sum of my parts,
More than the heart
that beats cold inside my chest,
More than the lungs that breathe the stale air
known simply, as existence,
More than these fingers
that trace outlines on canvas,
paper, flesh, surfaces raw and
carved out, begging to be touched,
I am more,

I am more
than the scars that you've left,
Printed like the ink upon a newspaper,
Smeared and smudged when caressed by skin,
More than the brokenness that resides
perpetually in my mind,
More than the voices that taunt,
haunt & flaunt their superiority
to me at night - laying all of my
failures past before me like photographs
left over from another life,
I am more,

I am more
than the smile on my face,
Be it real or fake,
More than the breath's I take,
More than the mistakes I make,
I am more,

I am more
than the dreams I dream,
More than the songs that I sing
lost hopelessly in the melody
& tumbling over words - off cue,
More than the days I starved,
More than the times I have carved
with a blade, my sadness - forever
in my epidermis,
More than the heartbreaks that
nearly broke me down for good,
I am more

I am more
than the paintbrush in my hand,
Swirling over surfaces prepped with
Guesso - colors blending and bleeding
into something beautiful in my soul,
More than the words I write,
or type, in the night,
hoping to expunge some
of the impulsive pressure that
builds forever in my soul,
Leaving me - a state of desperate
that I pray you never know - curled
fetally in a corner,
I am more

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,
Makes you run harder, faster, longer,
Makes you sweat blood,
Makes you afraid,
Makes you sad, lonely, pale,
But from all of that - you still become more
For with every ounce of the old you
that you lose, whether you
choose to or not,
you replace it with a piece of steel
that can never be ripped from
your humanity again,
You become forged in
a fire that burns eternally,
Hotter with every passing day,
Until one day you are pure gold,
Never dull or filthy again,
But rather - bright and gleaming
in the light,
Because you have become

...more

An Artists View on Heartbreak

"I'm sorry...Nothing can hold me...Do you really want me? I adore you still. But I hear them calling...calling...and nothing can hold me..." Evanescence "Swimming Home"



 

I've been so lost beneath the surface

of my own skin, waiting, waiting, waiting

to hear you call to me once more,

Pull me past the watery reflection of my eyes

that seem, to most, to go on for miles inside

my head,

Nothing can hold me here anymore, though,

I've finally let myself grab onto the truth -

nothing more than a simple pair of rusted pliers,

used to pull out the shards of your lies from

my heart,

The one that used to beat for you, and you alone..

But I heard my name from somewhere

far beyond and darling, it was not your voice,

the one that used to be melodic to me,

used to lull me into the most wonderful sleep

while lost in your arms, surrounded by

your soothing body heat,

But I finally learned to sleep alone

and in the cold, and darling, that's alright,

Because if I cannot learn to love myself, you said,

I would never love anything else,

You were right,

I am finding that you were right on

plenty of issues that no one else

even saw,

I wonder, though, what you saw in me...

there...there at the very last...

Did you see my desperation?

Did you peel the masque from

my face one night as I slept, soundly

and safe, in your arms,

You know I adore you still,

But this voice, love, it keeps hollering

out my name, all hours of the day and night,

and it smells of places unseen and experiences that

I am letting slip through my grasp,

All because you decided to break our bond

of trust and shove the tiny shards deep into

my already broken heart,

& darling, removing them takes time,

but I'm finally making some progress,

finally...

& from the depth of my soul, where

I've spent so many months staring at the water's

surface far above - wishing someone would come

and find me,

A trapped mermaid in this rusted cage of your "love"

and let me out, I am beginning to pick the lock

myself,

Because Prince Charming cannot swim,

Cannot dive into the depths of one's humanity

and release them from a self-constructed cage,

especially while they sit within that cage and hold the key around

their bruised throat,

I changed down here, love,

I am not myself, or the self that you knew, or the self that I was

or the self that I hated,

I am evolving like Darwin's theory and am slowly adapting

my emotional genetics so that someday, someday

I can pull these keys from my throat, unlock my cage,

and swim out the door,

& I will rise, someday, to the surface,

& when I break through it, I will break through

everything that kept me bound by you,

 

I thought you were going to be my everything,

my only one, my soulmate, my eternity,

Had dreams of us sitting upon a lovely porch

swing in our golden years, drinking tea and

talking of our life together, you & I,

But some dreams are not meant to be

and there is nothing we can do to change that,

 

So we lock ourselves away inside,

trapped, only mentally, by the hauntings in our mind,

the terror and trauma of abandonment,

the loss of a dream that we desperately pursued,

and we wait, beneath our skin...waiting...

 

Until one day we realize that we held

the clay from that dream in our hands the

entire time,

and only we can set fire to it, purify it

like gold, and reconstruct another

dream, until it's finally able to stand the

test of fire, able to be painted, glossed,

turned into something beautiful,

 

Because that's what artists do - we

take our broken pieces and assemble them

into something already good, and make it

magnificent...

 

We are the life-givers to a million

dreams, hopes, plans, desires, passions,

and we never discard any piece of material,

because, just what if it is THE piece left to finish

our greatest work of all...

 

So darling, I don't dare discard your memory,

or hate it, despise it...

I just keep it in a box and hope that someday I will

find the canvas upon which to attach it - making

my greatest work: life...

The Little Girl Inside

She lives behind the epidermis
of my skin, covered with red
gashes and bone-white scars,

She sits and taunts and
haunts me, as she always has
and always will,

She waits until darkness
falls and I have sunken deep
into the coma-like death of
cold sleep,

My heartbeat erased to almost nothing...

Once she sees my vulnerability
from the inside, her tiny, child
spindle-fingers lace through the
xylophone of my ribs, wrapping,
winding, clutching with all of her
might...

& she cracks them apart...

I shriek and wake, jolted
upright in bed, cats mewling,
having been roused from slumber,
staring at my frame - arch-backed
as a smooth, crescent moon,

I cannot scream for the pain...

She punches her fist
past my sternum, & I
hear it clink on the floor
somewhere in the room,
landing between the crinkled
backing of Marya Hornbacher
and Christ, himself,

& she sinks her little
fingernails into my skin
from the inside out, digging
her way out of my soul like a
pale-faced, empty-eyed corpse
from my flesh-grave,

& she does know that I will soon perish...

She possesses the strings that hold
me and contain me - her plaything, a
marionette - she swings me to my
cupboards where the thousands of
rainbow colored pills lay in wait
for my immediate consumption,

Jerking my wrists this way
and that, my Puppet Master,
she has me take everything in sight,
and then off to the dresser drawers
we return, where she keeps my
razorblades "just in case"...

& she turns my strings just right
and I slit my wrists "just so"...and
she smiles with her black, hollow
little eyes that gleam a bubbling,
foaming hatred for him, for me
and everything else that ever was
or will be...

& we sit together and have
a tea party, while the pills and
blood loss become my fatal
delirium,

& we are playing Alice in Wonderland and
I am Alice, she is the Mad Hatter, and
I have eaten the cake and drank the bottle
of poison, but I am neither large nor small,
for I am dead now...

& she pours my corpse another cup of magic tea...

To Love a Poetess

If you ever love a poetess, prepare yourself,
For poetesses are creatures of great feeling,
Great, deep, all consuming feeling
and once you are encompassed within
those feelings,
You can never be erased from within her,
She will write you love letters, sonnets,
lullaby's, haiku's and maybe even a book,
She will wrap her mind, body, heart and
soul around your entire being and cocoon
you in her adoration and love,
You will be nestled there for eternity - or
as long as you choose,
Should you love a poetess,
She will display her affections towards you
in a myriad of ways,
Some will surprise you,
Some will shock you,
Some might even be a tad embarrassing,
But the poetess has long since
learned that the only way to leave
a mark on the world, is to
scar it with one's presence,
Should you choose to love a poet,
she will place herself behind you,
never before you,
She will turn you into her muse,
Her opus,
Her art,
You will be the focal point of the entirety of
her blissful existence,
However...
Should you decide that her affections
are no longer required, her love no
longer needed, her presence no longer
desired,
Prepare yourself to become
her Grand Epic,
She will have lost everything with you,
She will believe that everything that she ever
wanted, needed, craved - is waltzing
right out the door of her Universe right
along with you and the stubborn 'clickclick'
of your heels,
And once you have slammed the door
in your triumphant, egotistical finality,
She may just put on her finest furs, jewelry,
manuscripts on the table, waltz to the garage with
all of her love letters to you, turn on the engine of her car
with a bottle of vodka and suck carbon monoxide
until she sleeps and dreams of you forever...
For if you love the poetess, you will become
her heart, and should you rip yourself
from the body of her world, she surely
will die,
without you...

Cutting Addiction

I am a slave to the blade,
A slave to my pain, punishment
and purgatory,
I slip a needle in my skin to try
and silence the demon that
causes my flesh to burn.
But I cant...
He screams at me still,
to slash open my legs, arms,
chest...I can't get him to stop
I plead in my voiceless way,
Plead for some help,
but they none of them see me,
None of them see me for what I am...

I don't need you to tell me that I am
"strong", "brave" "made so much progress"
or "i can't deal with your depression"
....I need you to tell me that one day, when
I fall off the wagon (as every addict does)
you will still love me and you won't change or
abandon me....

Because "I'm six feet from the edge and I'm thinking, maybe six feet ain't so far down" ...

The Addict

& She'd give anything to make the pain stop,
Give any little tiny thing she could muster,
Any word, beautiful epitaph, chronology, excuse,
Excuses, she's full of those, isn't she?
But what you don't know is that she once was full of life

She once radiated a glow that drew people towards her,
Once controlled the atmosphere of a room with her cheerful laugh,
Once danced upon stages, reciting lines from a book of words,
Pretended, pretended and loved every moment of it

Now she pretends to be okay,
On this broken, cracking to the cornerstone, stage of life,
Where they ripped off the wing of her costume,
Slashed the velveteen garments she performed in,
Dancing, now, beneath the body of the man who will give her what she wants,
Reciting the words from the beautiful, thick book where she hides until he is finished
destroying her once again

One pill....

Two pills....

Three pills....

Shot of vodka,
Shot of Jack,

Time elapsing...

Finally, release...

They dissolve in her bile,
Seeping through the cracks in her intestines, hitting her blood,
and finally, finally, finally - she is at peace enough to rest

Ambien/Klonopin Ramblings #9,857

No matter how hard she tries,
the silence won't leave her alone

Won't let her breathe in
peace, won't let her smile from the inside

Silence takes his chilly hands
and wraps them around her neck

Sending goosebumps along her
neck bones, down to her sternum

He reminds her that she is not of them
Not of the ones who can function the way they do

Get up, go to work, discipline,
fortitude, friendships, families,
history repeating itself for them

Not her
Never her

She watches them - awestruck
at the simple movements that they make

How the fluidity of their days
liquefy into one another, small raindrops pooling
in the empty bottles of time

She wants to be a part of that
Not much, just her own small square of the world

A tiny corner in the Universe where
she could possibly belong

To someone
With someone
With some tiny one's
Maybe even a cat or two

Husband, House, Cars,
Well trimmed lawn, Smiling neighbors
that wouldn't look down at her for the ink
she has on her skin or the hoops of sterling in her ears

She dreamed of "home"
She dreamed alone
Thank God the Dr. put her on Prazosin
for PTSD nightmares,
Cuz' now she won't have to dream anymore
and wake up to find that dreams don't manifest
for her the way spells used to

Another man,
Another bed,
Another flop of a relationship,
But who cares, really?
She has ambien and klonopin and prazosin
to take care of all the day/night fears and tears

She has her magic spells
They just sit in bottles on a shelf these days
instead of in a book or in cards

If this were Alice in Wonderland,
She would have turned into a puff of
smoke from the caterpillars hookah by now

Just drifting away...away...away...away...