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

by Halsey

I can’t carry all this weight, so I must put it somewhere and somewhere is with you. You will take good care of it? 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.

I hope you’ll stay. I hope you’ll stay. But I would leave me too, if I could.

And it was on my first day on Earth that I realized I didn’t measure up, and I never would.

I WANT TO BE A WRITER! It is not a want. It is not a wish. It’s simple. A demon waiting at the foot of your bed to grab your ankles while you sleep. It’s a gnat burrowing into your ear and laying eggs behind the socket of your eye. It’s sitting in your own filth for days, staring at the shower across the room while minutes become hours. It’s six months since you’ve talked to your dad, And whining like an infant to your lover begging to be spit-shined like a piece of silverware, “I have given so much to the page, please tell me I am not worthless.” It is not a desire.

It is a clenched jaw and an aching back and a disposition to spite everything around you. To find the world not worthy of your words, and to find yourself unworthy of the world. It is towering arrogance that says, “Let these passages be free in an existence that will cherish and worship them.” It is a terrible self-loathing that sends your teeth sinking into your lips. It’s a gut pushed out and shoulders slumped and a sneaking suspicion that everything you see is altered through your gaze. They cry, “But I WANT to be a writer!” And my head hangs. You are asking to be shot square in the head. You know not what you seek. You ask for bleeding brains

and carnage that stains your pillowcase. You ask for jelly in the place of the cartilage in your spine. You ask for kindness that is never returned. You wish to burn alive in th...

LAYERS Thank you for stumbling across the universe with your confident swagger and tripping right into my lap. Wild hair spilling across your eyelids and nestling into my mouth with my kiss on your forehead. Thank you for the freckles on your nose that keep me star-crossed, starry-eyed, and then cross-eyed when I’m lying underneath you and I look up at your darling face. You’re made of everything good in this world. Syrup-sweet and paining my teeth dripping from my lips like honey from the bees buzzing in my head driving me crazy, daily, with the sounds of your voice echoing through my skull and the halls of my house still ringing from the last time you were here, the last time it was a home. Thank you for warming the industrial gray of my concrete foundation and turning my bones from cement blocks to rich mahogany wood. Layers.

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.

Been biting my tongue till it bleeds cry over things I don’t need. My mother told me pick your battles wisely but you made me angry at the world so I chose them all.

There’s a love/hate relationship with noise in my brain.

I am not allowed to want to die anymore. Believe me, I have tried.

THUMBELINA I am so thankful that your mouthful of 88 piano keys charmed itself into my ear. I am so lucky to have a handful of chocolate brown hair in a bushel, bunched up, brushing my fingertips when you lie in my lap. Your mouth slack and your pink lips parted ever so slightly. Your rose-colored cheeks and green eyes and tan nose and chestnut freckles and blue-violet veins beneath the skin; all the good colors of some angel in a Renaissance painting. 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 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. Your face brings me all the joy of the entire world, right to my bed. Right to my hands. Right in the breath like a tide in your chest.

FOREVER… IS A LONG TIME I spent a long time watering a plant made out of plastic, and I cursed the ground for growing green. I spent a long time substituting honest with sarcastic and I cursed my tongue for being mean. Weightless, breathless, restitute. Motionless and absolute. You cut me open, sucked the poison from an aging wound. And now 50,000 war cadets would cower at this small brunette. To my surprise, not 6 feet high, who’d reach and grab the moon, if I should ask, or just imply that I wanted a bit more light, so I could look inside his eyes, and get the colors just right. I spent a long time calling all my parts by evil nicknames, and I told myself they hate me too. But you spent a long time, tending to a home that’s burning in flames and your patience made me love you. Build love, build god, build promises build calluses, then build provinces ’cause I have found somebody who would build life, then demolish it. And we could simply hit rewind, to live it all a thousand times find views in fucking Kathmandu, to watch it from a different height (and we’d comment how the sun shines) I searched the world to find you hiding inside me the whole damn time. Weightless, breathless, restitute…