Taylor Rhodes

reining yourself in because why ruin a good thing? why make it weird? and then you say goodbye, with a hug, with a snarky remark, and head home. you climb into bed and imagine them with you. you think about how their hair falls in their face, about how they breathe when they sleep. you think about them waking up and nudging you into consciousness with soft kisses down your torso. you sit in bed and think of all the ways you could make their soul dance. how you know their quirks and it all feels so right, but why? why is this happening? why can__ you just be content with what you have now? except even now you have to control the urge to kiss them, even though it is in your nature, even just on the cheek, because what if it breaks the relationship apart at the seams? you may not even mean it sexually or romantically, but what if? and there__ always the chance they have felt this way too. but it__ only a chance. and why risk it? so you lay there in bed and twist the sheets around your legs and text them back about another person they have feelings toward and coax them into something healthy. you put their happiness before your own. you watch as they stumble and help them rise mightily. you gush over them and try to snuff out the selfishness that builds whenever you see them with someone else. it wouldn__ be fair to them to impose your own wants on them and take away a good friendship. it isn__ always about you. and yet here you are, writing this. writing this and thinking of someone specific the entire time.

no one can recover if they won__ admit the wrongdoings. i won__ recover if i pretend it was all sunshine. i have to remember his vindictive temper and realize that sheltering the house from the storm wasn__ actually going to make a difference if i still got damaged in the process. because then it__ just another broken house with no one to tell its story.

derelict. my voice cracked and yolk poured out. wind chimes rigid, no breeze, no song. my wings found hidden in your suitcase. pleas for help mistaken for a swan song. i'm stuffing pages from my journal down my throat as kindling. hoping the smoke will get the taste of you out of my mouth. he looks at me from across the room and all i want is to push him against the wall. ravage. ravage. carnage has never been more vogue. is it still art if it doesn't bring you to your knees? lover, let me prey at your altar. let me bare my fangs in praise. don't i look so pretty in a funeral shroud? i keep time with the click of my creaking bones. dance with me under the milky translucence of a world suffocating. how did you find me? i buried myself beneath the cicadas. is a girl trapped in glass still a prize?let me get under your skin. i want to know what your fears taste like. i want to consume.

Is it bad to like the way the scars look on my skin? Oh, the way they feel under my hands. My body__ protecting itself, saying, __o, this barrier of scar tissue is to keep you out.

And then it changed. I wasn't letting him anymore. He was taking, pawing, grabbing. I pushed, I cried out, I squirmed, but like I said it's a shitty game and he didn't feel like playing by the rules anymore.

I'm nineteen tree rings and mashed acorns stop up my veins when I can't clot. Oh god, you beautiful person, I'll let you lick the salt off of my tattoos as if they were wounds, wounds made of ink and stories.

you remind me of someone i knew. looked just like you but kind.

I'd felt the pop of the needle sliding into my veins, like a fang into flesh. I'd been enveloped in the golden haze where nothing is wrong even when everything is falling apart. A dance with a hypodermic fiend, my hands in the claws of a vulture.

We are paint streaked runners,deafened by the cries of all the sad people. It's a powerful sound that practically yanks the tears right out of you. Sometimes, you just can't help but feel like a very smallclam ina verybig ocean.

You're elegance in a misunderstood form. Crystal quartz in a world of platinum. Oh, my dizzy boy, there's a fire in you that I use to warm my hands on chilly mornings.