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my name is Kai. i say all the wrong things.

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Progress

Based on a quote I saw circling the internet: “I am learning how to love the sound of my feet walking away from things not meant for me”

I am learning how to love the sound of my feet walking away from things not meant for me. The gentle close of a door on a chapter of my life no longer progressing the plot. I can feel true joy at my humanity, instead of cursing it. In this moment, everything I…

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Izzy

Please be breathing

When I reach your bed

Put my hand to your chest

Please rise and fall

Like the tides

Like the sun

Like a casket

Lowered into the ground

  Skeletons in the closet

For a skeleton of a girl

I write your eulogy

While you’re still alive, barely

Think about what I’m going to say

When it happens

Before the razors slice the

Red string of fate

And you slip away

  How…

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Green-Eyed Girl

Old Friend,

Do you remember when we were children? Hidden behind bus seats and cheap smiles

Yours the brightest of all

You were the shepherd of our grade, Everyone flocked to you

Like vultures to a corpse,

Circling

  I, so close to you

Close enough to feel your breath

Could not hear your battle

Unless cool winds blew in open door

Whistling

Echos of the happenings

It sounded like a…

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On Being

I hold memories like a notebook

I could scratch words out and edit

First drafts eclipsed by revisions

As if all the hungry bodies I fed

Would be fulfilled before they left

But in the end, only maggots came to dinner

In my bed

  It’s dirty out there

So my skin hardened

Scrub the grime off my scales

Blood swirls down bathroom sink

Porcelain stained red

Purge–

No man will ever touch me again

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[ohh-c0mely]

[leylafi-deactivated20200819]

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Isabellas Castle

To love an addict Whose sobriety never clicked Is to crush your own ribs Sternum caving in Seperate the sinner from the sin Don’t fit in her own skin Four months sober Shut your eyes and it’s over Daddy drinks bleach at night Momma can’t think quite right In her home- destitution But she found absolution In arms covered with aged track marks Before she chose the dark This is her home She was…

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Walk Past

Do not glance over cold shoulder when shutting the door Best left that way Risk perish to ash Sifting through old photographs, aflame As if memories can ignite gasoline rather than pain   Do not sneak in through the back when The tickets to a show you have seen before Sell out before you’ve reached the booth Already know how it ends He’s on stage but you’re the one that gets Played   Rehearsed…

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you dumped me on a sunday afternoon, you stupid asshole. i miss you.

you dumped me on a sunday afternoon, you stupid asshole. i miss you.

saudade the presence of absence what it means to feel you not here used quilt on wet grass on summer night hard lemonade and the cicada symphony as we made up names for constellations that wrapped around the sky like a hand curved around spine, lips surround collar bone i waited for you to kiss me   you took up residence in what used to be part of my heart was it the attic or the basement, the…

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Manic

The plateaus of your heart scrape the horizon like manducated fingernails Unmoving in the sand storms of your mind- blinding and abrupt Beautiful until it was my eyes the grit stung You were the result of an immovable object and an unstoppable force colliding like gnashed teeth and bruised knuckles two lovers at odds the last breath before death and I was content to watch the tectonic plates…

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Alaina

She appears in sleep thoughts sometimes Seventh grade teacher who asked to be called Coach But never taught a sport Just swing danced with his girlfriend on Saturday nights   She stood in the corner during class Always faced towards the windows Gangly girl shifted weight side to side We all thought ADHD but in reality it was It hurts to sit down   She had the kind of blonde flutters I thought…

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Cigarette man speaks broken english Ask for a pack of smokes Grabs a pack of menthols from behind the counter Ask how his days going while he rings it up (rrrr-chu-chu-ding!-shhhhtt-kuh) He says long and tired Cigarette man is just trying to get through the long day With nickels and tobacco falling through holes in his pockets So he can go home to an empty house   Front man’s dealer isn’t picking…

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TEXT I DIDN'T SEND

TEXT I DIDN’T SEND

It didn’t feel the same When he touched me as when you used to He was all hard-flat-palms and please-fuck-me But I couldn’t do it Even though he had loved me for five years, Waited for the right heartbreak to make me Malleable as clay But I was more like sand the ocean leaves behind Wet enough to mold but never stayed together for too long He wasn’t you, Soft-caress, lips-in-crook-of-neck,…

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Room 302 (B)

Such malleable beings we are learning to love No stranger in my dreams Sad cowboy man feeds stray dog outside saloon I kiss him just so I can sate the cravings with a taste I’ve always hated rum but it’s easy to pretend I don’t It’s harder to drink less   // I shot up As shame splintered fingernails    

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Give Me The Sun (I'm Ready Now)

Give Me The Sun (I’m Ready Now)

I will not pretend to understand love When I have only felt twisted forms of it That tied around my neck like a noose I will not profess to know what it is like To hold the makeshift sun in your hands and hope It’s light shines out of your palm lines Like melded marigold I will not claim to have experienced the stirrings In my chest at the whims of a man No, I will not say I have felt that but I…

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What They Don't Tell You

What They Don’t Tell You

I was six, wearing a necklace my sister gave to me made of a piece of green string and cheerios. Face down, he ripped it off my neck, held it like a noose as the honey covered loops fell off one by one. The mattress is dirty now, can’t sleep here anymore. I remember how my mouth opened against the covers as I mouthed prayers, but I never screamed. There’s blood on the sheets now Dad, I’m sorry,…

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Validation

I remember the vodka pong table and orange juice and two dogs. Blackness. I went out to the pool in my clothes. Blackness. One moment of awakening and being afraid. Blackness. The rest is completely erased from my mind. The thing about being so drunk you don’t remember anything until your best friend tells you is you don’t know if you said no. The thing about it happening when you’re drunk,…

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