I swallowed all of my memories;

a child

inhaling her first white pill

at parties that once upon a time

I placated

festering

and peeling

like wall-paper.

I had a dream once

that I thought myself to be

a wise women

in my adulthood

while dreamily

I dosed through my teens.

I don't like to think back now,

finding my notebooks and journals a bore-

myself

always asking

why?

And still now years later

the question still dances across my lips;

my body

childlike again

in my ballet class.

I felt disjointed once;

Juliet

in a jaded white shirt and jeans

boiling over

at the thought of this first kiss

which I fell into his arms for.

Swallowing my memories

I hate to think back

taken

aback

with all that I still lack

from those brittle pages

stained

with time

and the well worn swiftness of my penmanship.

I remember that I kept a picture of him on my nightstand

and kissed it

with rose colored lips each night before closing my eyes to sleep.

Sullenly

I can tell you that I once brushed my fingers across the Madonna's cheeks

believing

that she in all her pureness

could somehow purify me as well.

I can tell you nothing of the last five years

a blur

of hazy monologues

and phone calls:

Amber

calling

me

to

say

that

Tyler

put

his

finger

in

her

and

she

was

afraid

but

wanted

revenge

none

the less.

Another:

"I can take care of myself"

then

click

the line went dead.

I move aside

within the bathwater

that I am contained in.

My latest

way out

holding me

in the cooling water

his breath breathing kisses on my black-lined eyelashes.

I want to tell you...

I want to write it

but the noise

silences me.

I want to say how much I loved him

but the thought seems meaningless now.

How my heart

so dead

at age thirteen

had been awakened

only to be murdered once more.

I suppose

that is my fate,

my solemn

superiority

to love

all those who destroy me.

To kiss the lips

of one more bleeding boy-

I have never slept with a man

only boys

naked

as I

but their hearts always clothed-

hooded

baseball capped

silence.

Black fingernail polished dreams

waking

to turn the water off.

I turn the pages

hesitatingly

as he sleeps on my bed;

the same bed that I lost my virginity in.

I do not know what I will find

in these alien paragraphs

that my hands once wrote out.

Sentences

doped up

on Ecstasy

and paragraphs

of pain

paralyzing

the fifteen year old who wrote them.

I swallowed my past

in the shallow gulps of a drowning women

happy

in the surrender that I have never truly been unhappy.

I could tell you that my pulse quickened

that my heart

once so brittle

has hardened to a respectable metal

that even I could not name

something soft

scared

and neatly comfortable

should you chose to place your trust in it.

If you saw me walking down the street you wouldn't even guess that you had seen me.

If I were no more then five feet away from you

reading these verses

that had been

scribbled on a napkin

with fuzzy red ink

at a restaurant while I hid in the bathroom stall

still

you would not know me.

As though my eyes were not a dead give away,

I can't even look at them in the mirror anymore

without flinching

at their coldness

which

like snow

to a child

attracts broken people.

I'm leaning

like a stroke victim

to find peace with the harsher side of myself

the darkness

with exists jointly with the lightness.

Their will always be a shadow to my smile

and a pin prick

to my voice

but peace of mind

alone

can only come with the completion

of ones own self.