so i take deep breaths

because really,

what else do you want from me?

what else can I give?

you have wrung me dry

you have chewed me up and spat me back out again

and I have written so many poems

about hope and survival

about flowers growing in sidewalk cracks

about the patterns I've carved into my ribs

about sunrises and stars

that i wonder if you've taken all my words from me

i dont think i have any room for those kinds of poems anymore

i think maybe all i have left to give is the air in my lungs

the blood in my veins

i don't know what shape my heart is anymore

i think maybe it's crying

i think maybe it's crippled and bruised and begging

i used to think defeat would feel like a bullet wound, but it doesn't

it feels like the world inside me is shutting down

it feels like falling from a 5 story building and not breaking a single bone

i have nothing left for you to take

but please, don't let that stop you,

you can have the salt from my tears

you can have the oxygen from my lungs

you can have my ashes

you can have the dust and the shadows i leave behind

you can have the marble of my tombstone

you can have the

you can have

you can

you

y

And this is for the people

Who can only fall asleep

When they imagine someone holding them

Here’s to the words we never heard

And the love we never got

Here’s to the worlds we never saw

And the lives we haven’t lived

Here's to our messy journals

And half baked second chances

Here’s to fairy lights

And overflowing bookshelves

Here’s to hours spent alone

And weeks spent silent

Here’s to the worlds we build in our heads

And break down in our dreams

Here’s to the insomniac over sleepers

And the cynical optimists

Who put the hope into hopeless romantic

Here’s to the mediocre overachievers

And our overflowing planners

Here’s to the people we almost were,

And the pedestals that mark their graves

Here’s to the midnight cigarettes

And the stolen deep breaths

Here’s to everything we haven’t learned yet

Here’s to the flowers that grow

in the spaces between our ribs

And the in cracks in the streets of our hometowns.

Here’s to the places you’ll go.

Here’s to the things you’ll build.

Here’s to the people you’ll love

And the ones who might love you back.

Here’s to a book that’s empty

And the pencil on the floor next to your desk.

bravery is in the flowers that grow

through cracks in crumbling pavements

in their bent stems and crushed petals.

A resolute brokenness

that seems to whisper

I have been broken before,

I have been shredded and torn

and troddenn on

and I am still here, and you can't change that

and apparently,

neither can I.

My heart beats,

even when I don't want it to.

It pumps blood through my veins

It times the tempo of my breathing

a metronome in the shape of a clock

that counts the seconds i try to steal from it

that watches my youth slip through my fingers

trying to catch success like smoke.

My heart is a glorious mess of scar tissue.

It loves me when I beg it to stop

it squeezes and grows to make room for every new sunrise

when I am particularly hopeful

I imagine its craters and hollows match the moon

when I am not,

I imagine it shapeshifts

takes on the form of a fist

closed tight enough to leave

crescent-shaped scars.

the pulse in my wrist taunts me

with a timed ode to existence

a sonnet of survival

That seems to whisper

Who do you think you are

To think you could break me

In any way that matters.

(I take a deep breath and listen to the triumphant beat of my heart. I am, I am, I am)

you look at me

and I am carved out of marble

I am the Sistine chapel

You trace patterns into my skin,

connect the freckles on my thigh into a constellation

you study me like the stars

I hadn't accounted for the possibility

That I could be loved like that.

and when you have left

and the altar we built together crumbles,

I will always know

that you loved me enough,

to turn me into art

i found you at an altar of ivy and gold

we tarnished the ground we stood on

spilt blood and salt and made it holy

and i have never believed in anything

bigger than myself

but in the silence

and the glow in your eyes

I have found something to pray for

Before you go, do me a favour,

don't go kissing stars

and looking for gold.

Because no good has ever come,

from pedestals and promises.

And no love has ever grown,

without dirt in the soil.

cite your sources.

I spent years in a classroom

learning how to pretend my thoughts were someone else's

learning how to quote Plato instead of

that one time i spent too long looking at the sunrise and suddenly the whole world made sense

learning how to trim ideas down,

too big to cram into textbook margins or 12 pt times new roman (double spaced).

i shoved ideas too huge for the open sky

into 800 words, 3 pages single sided

and i learned to pretend like what i was saying still mattered.

tell the story of the whole world

in ten minutes

anything over 9 minutes 59 seconds doesn't count.

you are only worth how quickly you can talk

before losing your breath

how many words in the lines

artful cursive, before your hands start to cramp and the clock runs out

and anything you had left to say fades out of existence

as if it had no value outside an A4 page, college ruled and stained with expectation

there is so much of you in me,

sometimes it takes my breath away.

And i think that maybe we stopped time,

bottled it and put it into a locket,

and so these moments have never left me,

they stay nestled at the broken skin of my collarbones.

And because I knew you,

part of me will always be frozen,

at fifteen, sixteen, nine and ten.

watching the clock and counting the seconds,

writing in a diary that I should have let you read.

And because I knew you,

I'll never leave behind first kisses and acoustic guitars

playing love songs i don't recognize (even when i should, when you wished i would)

growing pains and metal fences and tear stained shoulders (and the way the stars look when they're reflected in your eyes)

the version of me that was yours,

the people that we were when we held the whole world in our hands and our hearts in our throats --

they'll never die.

the people we were to each other

are immortalized in the space between us.

tethered by the threads of time and fate

and stolen moments with stolen whiskey

connecting us at the ribs.

Because of you,

I will live forever

as a fifteen year old heartbreak

with chapped lips and hunched shoulders

and because of me,

you will live forever

as drunk and in love and a maybe little bit broken

with too many ghosts in your eyes.

we stopped time and built statues,

marble and bronze and ivy and elmers glue

and they'll crumble and rust

but they'll mark the hallowed ground

where our hearts will always beat too fast

encased in stone, and dipped in gold

I am more than the sum of my parts.

I am more than bleeding nail beds and silver scars.

I am more than unsent letters with no return address.

I am more than chapped lips and wringing hands.

I am more than untethered shrapnel.

(And I'll always be those things; I'll always bite my cuticles and disappoint people -- "hi im jade and i'm out of breath from keeping up with who i'm supposed to be")

But I know that I am more than the sum of my parts.

Because the freckles on my nose, arrange themselves in constellations

And I know that the stars fell and landed on my cheeks.

Because my eyes tear up and spill

The same water that carved mountains.

Because yesterday I saw a flower

Growing out of a guttural crack in the polluted pavement

And I saw the shape of my scraped knees

In the pattern of its petals

And I am more than the sum of my parts

Because I kiss my friends' papercuts

And I feel the night sky in my chest.

Because I write rambling poetry on napkins at midnight

And fall asleep with my arms clutched at my chest.

And i am more than the sum of my parts

Because the world stops spinning when I hold my breath

And the walls of my bedroom are stained with ink and dreams and melting candle wax.

Because my eyeliner smudges and the ground shakes when i walk.

and because of you

I am more than the sum of my parts.