I am more ghost than girl,

Empty-eyed and spread into the places that I shouldn't be:

The wrinkles of your sheets, the knot in your throat, the dents in the butter.

Once, a man planted a graveyard in my chest and I was told to grow from it,

To learn how to make something out of the nothing that he had left me with.

Make something out of nothing,

Turn myself into a fairytale and write everyone else into it because I only know how to love the things that I can control.

I grow poems,

I write about men that only love me when I tell them to,

Men that never want to touch me without my clothes on -

Or unless they are holding me together against the dark.

If I turn on the lights, if I open my mouth and let them in,

They will see that I have sewn myself raggedly closed.

Loving someone is the same as looking at them, or knowing them -

And knowing me is the same as holding your head under the water.

There has never been anything here to hold onto that will not drown you eventually.

Every boy that I have ever loved, I only would have ruined.

Loving someone is the same as letting them go and writing about them forever.

Only let them know after they find pieces of themselves in your poetry,

That they may have left but they will never be gone from the paper garden that you planted them in -

That your heart is a cemetery and loving them is burying them there forever.

The boy that held me together with his bare hands in the dark still sleeps beside of me,

The pillows still smell of him and sharing a breath in two mouths is the same as making love.

I turned the swelling song of his sleeping heartbeat into the ocean,

I wear a shell around my throat and when I miss him, I press it to my ear.

I taste him in my mouth, stale cigarettes and stained innocence.

This is how ghosts haunt a ghost, and isn't this head a mess?