#nofilter

I’m tired of going to concerts

where you watch the whole thing through a phone camera.

tell me,

how can the music

seep into your bones?

how do you live

when you resist the sweet delight of surrender?

I might own a name-brand outfit of the day

but I also wear sweatpants

stained with paint from the day I helped a friend ask a girl to a dance

and a T shirt with a bleach spot

from the one time my sister did the laundry

and Sperrys that my baby cousin spit up on

(but she smiled when I tossed her in the air.)

I love picture-perfect restaurant lunches

But I have spent more time eating three too many slices of pizza

and sips of beer in the name of rebellion

and gnawed-away fingernails and dressing-free salads.

I am a surge of lightning barely contained by tightly packed cells,

a worst nightmare and a sweetest dream.

if I didn’t have skin to hold me together

I would be far far away

and everywhere at once.

I am not created for this earth.

I am somehow here, drafted with too many colors,

dropped in a coloring book that only has room for in-between-the-lines.

Do not try to know me by a frozen picture.

I have gasped for breath with the claws of depression clenched tightly around my throat

And lost my mind with red lines and vodka veins.

I have wandered, lonely, through the woods,

demanding an answer from the heavens for cruelest loss.

I have felt lips as pure as sin

lighting galaxies across my body,

activating a lattice of electric veins.

I have lost a boy who was my morning sky,

because he did not know how to see the sunrise.

I want fire and fury and lust and destruction

aching soul and sobs and deepest depression

obsession and romance and sacrifice.

I want to be a handprint on your heart,

not a like on your instagram.

beauty is not a tax I owe the world in exchange for being a woman.

perfection is not a tax I owe the world in exchange for being a woman.

you cannot lock me in a photo still

and silence me with Valencia.

I reject the comparisons

and the temptation to forget my blessings

when inundated with

your highlight reel

(vs. my behind the scenes.)