I am as sensitive as my teeth
I wish they made sensodyne for the heart,
because I have vulnerable nerves that stem to my brain like trees in the most corrupt land you could hike through.
My mind is a decaying forest.
My thoughts are tangled branches.

My emotions

are disturbed soldiers in the most inconsistent war you can imagine.

I never know when a bullet of hyperactivity will be shot

or a bomb of depression will be dropped.

I'm a conspiracy theory that I can't believe in.

I

am the only stranger my mother will ever let me walk off with.

What can I say?

Peace has always found a way to friendzone me.

No matter how many poems I write or candle-lit dinners I set up for Mental Stability,
it never wants to stay with me.

And I don't remember selling my soul to the devil,

so how are these demons taking over me?

There are days when all I do is sit in my room chained to my theories,

rubbing my arms,

wishing Serenity would hold me forever.

I rub

and I rub

and I wish

and I wish and I keep wishing but I have discovered that my forearm is not a lamp;

no matter how much I rub or I wish,
a genie is not going to flow out of my palms and bring sanity closer to me.

I have discovered

that sometimes the things in life you need the most are going to just stroll right past you.

Those things

are what you have to speed walk towards and catch up to.

I have learned that I can’t be afraid to break a sweat;

I have to sprint towards happiness,

run a marathon for positivity.

Yes, some days I'm going to feel like a hopeless little puppy racing against beautiful gazelles.

But you know what, nobody cuddles gazelles so really

how great can they be?

Just because I can’t master the technique of sanity as fast as others have,

does not mean it won’t be the next skill I obtain.

Maybe right now sanity

is a really complicated dance;

but I am a studio built upon the foundation of complication,

so I am going to learn those moves and I am going to jive, tap dance, and twerk with stability.

And when daggers of doubt leave me wounded,

maybe I’ll cry over the blood;

but I refuse to linger in it.

I have learned that I can’t sit in a chair I know is broken

and then blame the wobbly leg when I fall;
If a negative thought collapses in the forest of my mind,
I can choose not to hear it.

If I feel like I can only play tunes of destruction,

then I have to learn a better instrument.

I am not going to allow the shackles of guilt or compulsions or instability hold me captive,

Because I have felt undesirable

and out of touch with everyone including myself for far too long.

I have been hiding

under crumbling bridges, but it's time for me to be a shining chorus.

I have always felt

like I'm just some blank page,

but I've realized that I could not be farther from it.
Because how can someone who feels so much
claim to be so empty?

I am bright, hot pink paper filled with more thoughts than cheap Walmart pens can handle.

I know

that no matter how much I pray or meditate or believe,

there will still be the cringing hours when painful cramps in my heart throw me to the ground so hard

I won’t think I can catch up to my future;

but I also know that ambition will find me.

It will rattle through my lungs,

do a bass line in my veins,

start a riot in my throat,

Force me

to look in the mirror and scream:

“Live your life on this earth

the same way you would like to leave it”.