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The bags under my eyes are the new Chanel and sore bleeding lips have become so much cheaper than another trip to the drugstore

I see scrapes on my skin and can’t help but want some more when writers compare my bloodshot eyes from sleepless nights to roses and the lilac on my wrists which have been clenched tightly one too many times to galaxies up in the skies

Modern poetry pierces through my skeletal spine as I read about the new American dream of broken families and Adderall since swallowing my anti-psychotics has allowed me to feel fuller than any meal ever could

Please, diagnose me one more time, glamorize and fetishize the way my collarbones stick out like Swiss army knives or how the only constant thing in my life is all these thoughts of suicide

Hold my hair back as I splutter rainbows of blood and guts into the toilet, but please turn around when you see me sprawled out on the bathroom floor; because this mess is always mine to clean up, not yours

The media begs for more and more coverage of this manic pixie dream girl which I’ve become

Yet the only coverage I need is a heavier sweater to conceal my slashed up wrists and crumbling lungs; making room for a person where there is none

Despite daydreams of dissociation and yearning for hospitalization, I still think this culture is the one that needs reevaluation

When I told him about choking on bottles of pills and the thrills of having feeding tubes shoved into a body that I no longer had the right to, he wrote novels about how he was going to “save” me. That night I cried tears of joy. I mean, it was just like Bukowski said it would be!

Always the art but never the artist, my persona was boxed into cubism; I was the weeping woman to his Pablo Picasso, the secondary character in my own motion picture

I was never mine to keep, taught that my legs were too fragile to stand on their own or that I really might put a gun to my head after another night alone

And I said, what’s a gun to the head if it’s not filled with bullets but with flowers and pearls to compliment the way my lip curls every time you crunch me up into another mental illness statistic

People like me have never been “people”, we’re always the love interest or the tragic plot twist, but not the ones who get to be heard

You shove words into my swollen mouth, stuffing a cracked ribcage with more lines to speak yet call me “psycho” whenever I make a monologue of my own

But my mind is mine and mine alone; Don’t ask about my first panic attack; Just because I describe it in white rage and red fits of passion doesn’t give you the right to turn my pain into a painting.

You have no entitlement to the story about the how my first kiss was a collision someone else’s fist or permission to call my wounds beautiful. Real life is not a fairytale; there’s no beauty to my beast and no metaphor for what lurks underneath this warzone

Don’t ever portray me as larger than life; I can write poetry on my own.