To The Person I Returned The Expensive Shirt To - Jordan Bolton

Poetry? More like CROWETRY!

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writing, music, drawing, cooking, painting, sculpting. creating. art of every form is beautiful, don’t you think? is it not worth appreciating, the work, the passion the love, of something someone made, created. it is quite irreplaceable. and once you start appreciating its different ways, the world becomes a lot more vibrant, i think

I think I was just born with something dark and ugly inside of me. Always waiting to be found out.

planetarium - adrienne rich/@twoheadedfawnn/ugly, bitter, and true - suzanne rivecca/a burning hill - mitski/a hora da estrela- clarice lispector/ @100493503004422/sharp objects - gillian flynn

The Secret to Happiness

You will get just what you give,

and take what you recieve.

A lesson you will come to learn,

you never must deceive.

To be yourself, a humble gift,

a freedom for your mind.

But this is not true just for you,

this gift of being kind.

You must be kind to everyone,

as they are kind to you.

Treat others with only respect,

you'll be respected too.

If you're content to be yourself

and let others do the same,

it allows them to be happy too

and live without the shame.

It starts with just a simple thing,

to treat yourself with care.

And then it spreads to everyone,

a kindness we all share.

If you give what you expect,

you will get very far.

The secret to your happiness,

be kind to who you are.

- SMP 💜 (be kind, be you)

May you never lose joy in writing

in internet posts it is easy to cut them out of your life. they are hurting you! they aren't listening to you!

they held your hair back. they lent you lipstick. they held your hand at the train station and got you home safe. they rounded on your bully, got loud, said get fucked, spitting-mad in your defense.

they also cut the hair off again. told you that you should really think twice before wearing something like that. took you for granted. took your insecurities and threw them in your face again.

you know logically it should be easy. all the internet advice comments always read it will feel better. like an equation - if a person is rotten, you just remove them. you pull the tooth that's hurting.

but it was never a big flare-up moment. you don't live in a sitcom. they never tried to take your boyfriend or steal from your apartment. they showed up to birthdays and they wrote songs about you and bring you water without you asking. once you found out they carry an emergency inhaler for you, even though you haven't had an asthma attack in years - just in case.

where is the line? people fuck up. sometimes they fuck up badly. sometimes people have raw personalities, like a powerline, and being around them is dangerous. addicting. sometimes they can't help themselves, but you know they're trying. sometimes they are just rough-around-the-edges. sometimes they don't even realize how they sounded when they said that. sometimes it's just - you've both loved each other for so long now, the way this thing hurts goes back to the root.

and that's the fucked up part. you have pushed your fingers against the sweetheart of memory. things these days are electric, tense, harrowing. they didn't used to be. there were a lot of good days in there. sometimes you want to just close your eyes and say can this be over yet? do we still need to be fighting?

doing that would give up any chance you get of getting an apology, but you don't always know that you need an apology, you love them. once they flaked on your birthday party. once they told you to get over it, people are always dying. they also let you crash on their couch for a week after the breakup, handfeeding you when you were so sad you couldn't eat. they are judgmental about everything, occasionally react to banal statements with an attitude that is weird and fiery. they also love you like a lighthouse sometimes, so strong they cut the storm like lightning.

but the problem is that you might be storm. you might be the thing that needs breaking. what if you are two forces who are desperately, horribly drawn to each other, shaped by the other person's passions, and good for each other and bad in equal measure.

what if you're both just people, and you're no saint neither.

just cut them off! swallowing the saltwater, you catch yourself in the mirror. you've been shaking more than usual. there's an ache in you that is oblique, loud, impossible to soothe. is this what it looks like? when life is "easier"?

your mouth will always have a hole, is the thing, if you remove the tooth.

we hunt the mighty pasta BEAST

and breadsticks are its BONES

ALFREDO FLOWS inside its veins

its organs are CALZONES

im a published poet

made a poem i wrote into a comic. anyone else angry that you have to yearn

When I was in middle school, I tried to learn how to crochet. I knew how to knit already, so I figured ‘how hard could it be’ and used my Christmas money on a brand new set of aluminum hooks and a how-to book.

To say it was difficult was an understatement. I spent hours pouring over my book, begging to gain some inkling of understanding from what felt like incomprehensible runes. My reward? One lopsided trapezoid of lumpy fabric and a resolve to never pick up a crochet hook again.

And so life went on, I finished middle school and high school without giving crochet so much as a second glance. In college, I read about how crochet couldn’t be replicated by a machine, it was unique in a way that knitting and many other fiber arts weren’t.

For Christmas last year, my girlfriend gave me what I now consider to be my most prized possession: a crocheted plush of my favorite pokemon. I raved over her skills and, since she never learned how to knit, we decided to have a yarn date at some point and teach each other our respective skills.

We never did get around to that yarn date. She passed a few months after our declaration, leaving me to inherit what was left of her yarn.

Nearly a decade after my initial attempt, I got ready for the toughest battle of my life. My weapons? One skein of yarn, a YouTube video, and a crochet hook that I had somehow never gotten rid of.

I slowly made my way through the video, redoing my work a couple times until I was satisfied with my product: a small, slightly misshapen rectangle.

I looked at my pristinely-made pokemon plush with hope for the first time in months and thought to myself, ‘maybe crocheting isn’t the hardest thing in the world, maybe you were just 12.’

Maybe this isn’t the hardest thing in the world. Maybe I’m just 21.