Love poem: Lily pad

Love poem: Lily pad

I don’t want to put my cards all over the table
Though I’m dying to show you what’s true
How real this significance is
My significant other

Sitting on my lily pad
You know I’m the only one that can get you to relax
Move in slow motion
I’m heavenly reserved
& I know you don’t do these things on purpose
But the caffeine in this Earl Grey tea
It’s making me nervous
I know you don’t do it on purpose

Swaying with myself in my bedroom
I can be violent if you turn the heat up
No longer desperate to be enough
I’ve got a sweetness concave within me
A fruit I only bear to those that can hold it
Tight

Pushing all my buttons
Convincing myself I kind of love it
Have I shown you what’s at the bottom of the sea?
Underneath all the make-believe

I don’t want to have to ask if you missed me!
I’m getting run over by the same train over and over again
My eyes close when I drive & I don’t even mind
Collect my cigarettes in an empty coke can
Police on a motorcycle
Firearms in my trunk
No longer desperate to be enough
I keep trying to make it to the bottom of the sea
But something pulls me back above
I want you to drown with me
If you do
Make sure I drown too

Don’t read into my words
Don’t touch me softly, then make it hurt
A one-way ticket to my favourite Chicago Transit Authority stop
Where I am free to walk around
I don’t need bells and whistles
I need the fogginess to stop

A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
On repeat
A rose that blooms
When I sleep
A rose that blooms
On repeat

I want you to drown with me
When I get off my
Lily pad

Support my work! paypal.me/LilacDoveCA

Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

Love poem: Perfectly real (really perfect)

Suddenly
The impetus is on me
To be perfect, so perfect, for you again
Satin & lavender bedsheets
Fresh clothes from the dryer
Neurons that synapse when the clock resets

But I can’t
Withstand
Dissonance
I can’t
Bear to
Live with regret
I can’t
Break free from
This tangled fishnet
The wire digging its claws directly into my spine

Disengagement when separated
Disregarded how you said maybe
Perhaps it’s my own agenda that
I failed to write out in black ink
My own handwriting looks foreign to me
The flowers in my apartment have finished dying
I closed the curtains, but someone is waiting
To see me burn out like I’ve been on fire this whole time

Carving my name into my solitude
Changing the location of a confined venue
I don’t like this dress
Don’t like how I look in it
Want you to tell me I inspire you to stop playing make-believe
Wish you would bring me roses & be gentle with me
Not let me lose any more sleep

I’m not really writing
I’m scared of defining
How lazy I’ve gotten at building my self-esteem
The ships are all sinking
The pilot keeps blinking
& the leftovers have spoiled because real things are only real in real time

So I hit “unsend”
Spend the afternoon in my garden
Playing with my own hair, saying your name to myself

I can’t even ask you
What you meant when you said nothing
Because I know myself to get in the way of what could be

I’ll trace my ashes
In long cylinder glasses
Faking a proof-of-concept of a girl who takes pride in the way she carries herself

Now I’m scared of writing
Because I don’t like what I see
And that holds far too much meaning to me

I’m sick of trying
To act like I haven’t been
Crying myself to sleep

Tell me I’m perfect
Say that you missed me
Step into my four-chambered studio where the pianos lack keys
& the guitars have no strings
We can dissolve into anything we want life to be

Tell me you missed me
Without lying to me
Tell me I’m perfect
Because you can see how I dream
Tell me you loved how
I didn’t seem desperate
To find in my own self what you’ve found in yours

I’ll rearrange my bedroom
Work on shifting my patterns
So that the stillness in your settings can bleed into me

Tell me I’m perfect
Without lying to me
Reach for me when I’m drowning
In my make-believe sea
Allow me to realize there’s more to let go of
More in life to make sense of
More in this life to see

When you’ve regained stability
Found blue-green lakes filled with clarity
Then, you can come back to me

I’ll be in my garden
Telling myself
That I don’t have to be perfect to be something real

Support my work! paypal.me/LilacDoveCA

Love poem: Red t shirt

Love poem: Red t shirt

Drawing soft pink porcelain dolls
Make every word of yours important
If you’re speaking with purpose
The chaos in this dark room
It makes me nervous
But when I’m touching you
Like peach pink amphetamines
You push something onto me that makes me breathe

For a second there
For just a minute
I lost my breath

For just a second there
For quite a minute
I’ve become oblivious

I get excited for a hot second
Come out with guns blazing
So self-aware, peach pit
You like the way I serenade you
Dance around you in top-secret chambers
Untold, leaving it untold
Don’t get anything for free
Write whatever I want
It’s my heart, I forgot
It’s my heart, I forgot
You make me soft

Put some Salsa on and I’ll show you my moves
What I keep in my medicine cabinet
I’m made of Cabernet red
I’ll drink you in three sips
Balsamic vinaigrette
Anything that rhymes with your safety net
I’m lying by the pool
God I feel so cool
Looking at you
Cabernet red

I’m kicking and screaming
I don’t want you to spend the night
Yeah, I’ll be alright
I’m kicking and screaming
Introverted
I don’t want you to stay the night
I’m kicking and screaming
Introverted
Red t shirt

You don’t make me nervous
I have these soft lips
Amphetamines for fingertips
Intoxicating, isn’t it

Be a dynamite of a human being & support my work! www.paypal.me/LilacDoveCA

Love poem: God’s timing (keep me safe)

Love poem: God’s timing (keep me safe)

Pink ballerina slippers
A child crying out
I have loved you – a thousand, a thousand, a thousand times

Your breaking voice
The cracks in the tiles of my ivory bathroom floor
If I could hold you forever
I’d be somewhere safe
Somewhere where the demons can’t get me
Looking into your soft, collapsed face

One day I’ll understand God’s timing
But honey, I’ll never stop trying
My dandelion
My aching Baby’s Breath
A cardigan I only wear when I smoke non-menthol cigarettes
Watching evening television
Will you be there with me?

Counting my fingers
Keeping me safe
A car on fire on the side of the freeway
I cannot wait until I get to see you again

Biting my fingers
Keeping me safe
I took you in my arms, but you showed me the way

I cannot wait until I get to see you again
I cannot wait

Donate to my website & support my work! www.paypal.me/LilacDoveCA

Love poem: May birthdays

Love poem: May birthdays

May is the month of Springtime flowers
But when you leave, the atmosphere is sour
And I’m alarmed
That you don’t believe in a higher power
When it’s sitting across the table from you

I was listening to a podcast where a guy said he went on a date with a woman that was exactly “his type,” so to speak, & he was driving home realizing he couldn’t pursue her because he didn’t want to fall into the same old patterns.

I thought of that statement when I saw you angrily crushing the buttons on your phone
That you call “a stupid machine”
Just like he did
Unreasonably angry in disregard for how beautifully my lilac, dreamlike eye shadow was blurred upon my bare eyelids
Not suited for the evening where we were supposed to celebrate your birthday
Which felt more important to me, than to you
I’d spent the previous evening looking for the most suitable birthday card in the CVS pharmacy that’s a few neighborhoods away, imagining they had better cards than the one several streets away from my residence
Half-wondering if you would display it
Half-knowing it’d be tucked away in a drawer

Do I want to be that girl?
Do I want my eye-shadow to go unnoticed?
Or the sparkle in my eyes to be diminished when you’re preoccupied with something external to yourself?
Do I want to write questions instead of statements on my own poetry website where love is the theme and I’m somehow not the main character?

Hollow and concave
Rich with vengeance
Who your enemy is, is probably unknown to you, me, or the population at large
But the gap I fill, gets bigger every day
But my body does not
So I sit in it, hardly occupying the space
That I wish I could cover like a desert storm would

Unreasonably empty for the evening
Watching you almost punch your steering wheel
Is this where chaos lands me
Is this the dream that I have been chasing down
Like I’m unsure of myself
Don’t know what to do with myself
Have gotten beside myself

Sitting at my desk
Writing, waiting
Wondering what my father would say
If he knew my teenage antics
At my sharp age of near-thirty

Every woman has a man that brings her down to a lower degree
I don’t want to know who I am beneath
The sweet girl I am when I get ready by seven in the evening
To celebrate a birthday that is more important to me, than to you

May is the month of Springtime flowers
But when you leave, the atmosphere is sour
And I’m alarmed
That you don’t believe in a higher power
When it’s sitting across the table from you

Support my work! paypal.me/LilacDoveCA