feelings

My Junior year of high school, I fell into a depression, and a friend introduced me to the power of slam poetry.
As the words spewed from my computer speakers and called me to realize my worth as a human I began to cry uncontrollably. I had found something that was more powerful than the bible, something that gave life to dead bones, and something that has encouraged and sustained me in hard times since.

recently. I have been processing a lot.
So I am trying to write some poetry to help me through that

Here it is: poem 2 || a work in progress

The stamp on my wrist

From the concert where I saw you for the first time in two years

 Still burns

Of course, in a time such as that I would comment on your hair

I was terrified that you would see right through the kindness and sense the fear

I was terrified that in those thirty seconds

You

Would rush back into my blood stream, through my legs and my arms and into my heart

And that I would let you

And I am not ready to let you

I am not ready to let go of the person I have become at a risk of allowing the doubt that you planted

Revive

I am not ready to again feel like the dark part of the lightning bug—the dim and nasty part that people often want to forget exists

While you paint the sky with dancing lights that keep everyone at bay

And far away

From me

I am not ready to be ready to ask you how you have been, to know the pain that existed in your life the pain that I ran away from and knowingly

Left you alone in

I am not ready to see how you withered away in the dust that I left when I hit the gas as hard as I could and sped away telling myself over and over again "you can't save you both, you have to keep yourself alive"

So I let go.

And when I did I thought, maybe someday I’ll be ready again

Ready again to accept that laughter and that squealing appreciation for everything round and shiny and inhuman

Ready again to love your luster and your glow

Ready to tell you how beautiful your hair is when you notice the simplest things about people

And that when you speak, you shine so brightly that everyone else seems to dull 

and that you are electric.

But tonight, I was not ready, and my skin burns with the reality of such fates.