I Would Leave Me If I Could: A Collection of Poetry

by Halsey

enjoy the silence in your kitchen. been watering all these plants made of plastic and you think they’ll grow. homemaker. shiny new things but they’re all for show.

I can hold a grudge like it’s a hand. I throw my watch on my nightstand. I am a worthless smudge On the floor, in the rug In the kingdom of the almighty God who will judge Me as hard as She can, ’Cause I won’t love a man Unless he is angry Because of my father.

Girls who weren’t sad and tired. Girls better than me. Who had learned to turn their trauma into adventures for him to stumble blindly through. Instead of wallowing in their brokenness and breaking everything in their path as penance.

She frowned at me. I began to panic. They say children can sense dread. This is the first child who hasn’t smiled when I cast a glance in their direction. Has my heart, once so full of love, finally drained itself like a yellow raisin? Will the children begin to notice?

THE MIRROR I’m pulling funny faces in the mirror, wiping down the glass so I see clearer. I’m trying to feel safe inside. My body doesn’t feel like mine. I look at who I am. I think I fear her.

like a static handcuff holding my hand hostage to your skin.

I love the coffee for staining your teeth and warming your palms in the morning.

Your eyelashes so soft and long I close my eyes and imagine them brushing up and down the length of my body. If only I could be so small to lie in your eyelashes

I feel like I’m made of plastic I breathe and it doesn’t reach my lungs I eat and I don’t taste I cry and there’s no burn in my nose anymore I’m standing in the middle of a 4-way intersection and a car is coming at me and I have no idea which way to go. Is this how it was supposed to feel?

I’m sorry I’m having another bad day. My tongue is twisted my words come out like venom. I only use my armor when you frighten me. Stuck in the middle of “I love you” and “I can’t take this anymore.” These things they come and go and I mean half of everything I tell you. I’m half of everything I hate, and half of anything I create is you too. So I start to hate the poems when I hate you.

Build love, build god, build promises build calluses, then build provinces ’cause I have found somebody who would build life, then demolish it.

How strange to write about “having” when for so long I’ve drawn inspiration only from longing?

I’m confused ’cause he’s hurting me while he says “please.” And he’s “only a man” and these things he “just needs.” He’s my boyfriend so why am I filled with unease?

I even went onstage that night in Chicago when I was having a miscarriage. I pied the piper! I put on a diaper! And sang out my spleen to a roomful of teens. What do you mean this happened to me?

I knew I was ready to forgive you When I wrenched the knife from my back I held it up high and it cast a menacing shadow over the face of the young man in front of me. Its shiny metal gleamed and glistened. I stood heaving and the veins in my face erupted like tree branches gnarled into the forest floor. I held the weapon retrieved from my own back. I gripped it once, twice, and then I put it down.

and that my cheek just fits the depression in your shoulder and that is all I need to know.

This is to remind you that you are a lover. That you melt at a glance at a touch. That you are a baby. You are soft and fragile and you need someone to tell you that everything is going to be okay. That you are an idiot and you are going to fuck up 1 million more times the rest of your life. But this is to remind you that you are a statue, gilded in marble, and there is white lightning in your eyes. Change shape. Give in.

I don’t say it often, but I’m proud of the woman that I turned out to be