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

by Halsey

I want to walk away from my bones and set them down on a counter like my keys after work. Let my skin sink into the armchair and lose its shape. Lose its form. Collapse into a sigh.

To find the world not worthy of your words, and to find yourself unworthy of the world.

Thank you for warming the industrial gray of my concrete foundation and turning my bones from cement blocks to rich mahogany wood.

It’s the feeling in my stomach like the moment you drop a scoop of ice cream into a root beer float and the entire thing threatens to bubble over. Carbonated and chaotic in my chest.

You soaked me down in gasoline Lit me up And then discarded me. You said you’d always love me from my head to my toes And then All at once you loved me to a little death.

I’m half of everything I hate, and half of anything I create is you too. So I start to hate the music when I hate you.

Emotions come and go, they’re either lovely or abusing.

Chartreuse like an aging bruise He speaks soft words but it’s still abuse

If only I could be so small to lie in your eyelashes as a hammock. Swim in the whites of your eyes. Dive off the Cupid’s bow of your lip. Hang with two hands from the corner of your smile like Peter Pan from a clock tower. Dance and splash in the tiny brown puddles of every single freckle. Crawl into the lobe of your ear and hide in the seashell cavern where I can hear the ocean and whisper it back to 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.

I searched the world to find you hiding inside me the whole damn time.

Your pen will hit the paper like a body hitting pavement and you will scrape your knees red over and over and over again across the fine lines.

He cracked a whip against my skin and sliced my flesh open, scarlet like the margin taunting me.

I don’t want to be this way, but I have been since you left. I should have never counted your eyelashes when you slept.

I saw the pink in my lips and the orange in my eyes and the blush across my chest. And I wondered how could I have not noticed the ways in which you dulled my senses and stole the color from the world right before my eyes. Of all the wrongs you committed, the worst was keeping me from the beauty in anything that wasn’t you.

Wish that I were manic all the time. Think I like me better when I’m all outside the lines.