Learning To Write Yourself Love Letters

A poem for all of those who have a habit of falling for those who treat them poorly, remember that you do not exist to be anyone's breakup poem or angsty piece of artwork. You're your own masterpiece.

Stop falling for those who 

Think they tower over you like skyscrapers

Those who shred your lungs into paper maché from all the apologies you're screaming from the windows of your soul

For those who tell you that your light is too dim when you are already so close to burning out from trying to please the cruel night sky 

Do not bend yourself into something broken for those who persuade you to destroy your own skin with the goal to climb out of it into something more pretty

You are not a broken match in a box of shining torches

You are the crisp, sharp edges of the stars, bright, blazing

Too strong to be stifled

Fall for those who bring telescopes in search of knowing every mile of your memories, your dreams

Fall for a stargazer, not one wishes to capture you and pull you down

Stop falling for those who will pick you like a flower

You will only become an edition to a daisy chain of lovers 

Whose torn away petals scatter their floors

Fall for those who will cherish you, who will not rip you from the soil of the places your feet are meant to take root in 

Do not fall for those who will use you just so they have good writing material when it is over

Fall for those who say you already are poems, volumes and volumes of poems too intricate to be written down

Fall for those who tuck happiness poems into the corners of your lips at night as you sleep

Do not find someone who will see you as empty notebook pages until you break up and you become their hate filled prose

Find someone whose pens run out of ink from trying to write you into the two dimensions of paper, and failing because you rip each page down the middle with your staggering beauty

Do not fall in love with those 

Who convince you that your scars are paintings 

Who tell you that bleeding feels like breathing

Who justify your self hatred by calling it poetry

Those are the kind of lovers who will cut open your skin with a pen and call it art

Fall for with those who tell you 

That alive is the only masterpiece you should ever strive to be 

That healing is a symphony of color

That you are a painting whose value cannot be bought

Fall for a healer who stitches your torn skin, not one who takes wounds and makes their jagged edges look pretty in the moonlight

You are not a sonnet 

Nor a misunderstood tragedy

And your flesh deserves more than razors in the disguise of murmured  promises that will later slice you open in betrayal

Stop falling for illusions in puddles on the sidewalk

The concrete stings worse when you expect beginnings where they are only endings 

Fall for those with tangible words you can see and touch and believe

Stop chasing after assassins with an already bleeding heart when you can see the outline of the knife in their pocket

Fall for those whose rough edges are honest but who will not use them as weapons against you

Do not fall for perfection

Fall for humanity 

But if humanity uses its roughness as an excuse to poison you, leave

Fall for a better form of imperfection

One who does not hide sharp things under your pillow and in between I-love-you's

Stop falling for those who pick you apart inside and out 

They think they are jewelers crafting diamonds

Instead they are destroying all of the soft places inside you 

Hardening you into unyielding stone that has nothing left to bleed

Stop falling for those who ask you to be their angel, only to later pull off your wings

Leave those whose flimsy excuses for the bruises they inflict form dark circles under your eyes

Find those who leave love clinging to your eyelashes

You are so much more than pretty

So much stronger than paper

Do not allow yourself to be stained by thick dark words that trap you

Or crumpled by fingers that do not deserve the softness of your skin

The only ones you should fall for my dear

Are those who think the sky is too narrow for your limits

Who allow you to spread your wings

Who never compare you to a tiny flower

When you are as strong as a forest

Most of all

Do not fall for those who push you from the windows of skyscrapers and call it flying

Fall for those who fall with you 

So you can fall together

In the right direction