








Here is a list of things
that cannot be changed;that which has been seen.
those that have died.
that which was lost with death.and I have seen crushing. violence piled upon my chest, stone after stone, the eventual caving of the body.I could carve myself, make myself unwhole as if to save you, as if to bring you back from the inbetween where you cannot see, where what you have seen was lost with the ending of your body.What is missed? What will not be found again?
What going has gone?Why is this my home?
Dreams that do not make sense.
Inner-speaker, why have you left?
After tonight, you will not know yourself.You will hear a stranger’s voice. you will feel some foreign pain, a deep gash, a festering, rotten wound. you will lick it,numb the pain with booze and
self-laceration and hate and fear.the alone in you will remain. it will howl out for its master. you will train your alone, you will know your alone, you will live inside of your alone forever.you will look in the mirror and see some stranger, dark circles around the eyes, bruised, stained, twitching, swaying,
breaking and burning in the light.
In the mornings
the harsh new
daylight was
very unkind
to me.In the night
I made an
arrangement
so I would
never have to
wake up again.Sometimes
I wish I never
backed out of
the deal.
Does anyone know when
they only have an hour left?My brain blares alarms,
tells me every day is an ending
every hour is the last of the world.Every day ends quietly, and
sometimes I think I've already died.Starved myself waiting for the last moments.
Smothered my mind making unneeded peace.
Should I empty out? Should I drain what's good?I want my death to have meaning, I want
this narrative to stop with a clear arc
and a clean ending. But to live is to write,
and to die a small death is to erase from the page,
or worse, leave it blank. I have spent so much
Time mythologizing my pain, cataloging it.I cannot live in a myth.No one knows the last hour.
It comes, takes, and leaves
a broken body without a spirit.
These days are not enough. These days are
Not enough and I have been bled out by sunlight.I have been bled out by the sunlight,
and the days are not enough to keep from
slipping under the flow of hours.The days are full of fire.
The days are full of harm.Where will we be at the end, when progression stops? The days are not enough, not strong enough,
bled dry of kindness. The days are bled dry of kindness and the door is barred shut.Where will we be at the end? When the only
thing left is the weakness of the hours, of the days, the bodies made fragile into dust.By the flow of the weeks. Bodies,
like heaps on the floor.These days are not strong enough to protect them.
The soul is a patchwork thing,
stitched together by mistakes.Truth and Beauty
are wonderful words.But shrapnel is shrapnel,
and at the end of the dayI am alone
with the things
I have done.
How many ghosts do you know by name?Do they come to you?Do they howl inside of you and rattle your
chains and shift around boxes in your attic?When you dream, can you see them rise from their tomb and float up, somewhere barely out of reach?
My dream is breathless and hot. I jump awake, sweating, drenched and shaking.One day I will rise above these bones.They are planted in this thing I call a body. They are chained in by this gross thing I call a soul. One day I will break it apart in my hands and escape
through the sharp release of air.Time is a puncture wound
and I let blood every day.It follows me around like a knife.
Let me speak to you, let me heal, let me help.
Yes, I know the law,
but I know myself, too.
And not smashing windows
was making me sad.
Some nights it curls up with you,
warm and soft, breathing
gently in your ear, docile tail
tucked under its sleeping form.Other nights it's the ragged breathing
behind you in an unfamiliar forest.
It's all too close and all too loud
and you know, deep down inside,
that you can't outrun it.But you will try and clamber and
crawl and push it away and it will
tear you to shreds by the first
sideways glance the sun gives the meadow.Love has fur and you can domesticate it.
Teach it tricks, knit it sweaters, cut its claws,
file down its teeth, but even a worm will turn.And it will leave you with
hair and blood caked under your nails,
or it will be left rabid, foaming, ownerless.
I share no link to my country.
I feel no heartbeat in these streets.
I see frostbitten hands and rusted fences.I feel no connection.All this smoke will
rise up from the earth,
broken factories,
billowing fumes.The mind begins a loop,
recreates the pain.
Half-knowing a
place I've almost been.
In my dreams
you rise up from your sickbed
and you open the door.The illness has run its course. How do you
think it will end? Will we be calm and
clean when the last hour comes?This body, failing and foreign,
blares new sirens every day.
A new panic furrows deep down.
Numbed to dust on the stone of the world.
Being known gives way to compulsion.
A violent rejection.
I hold my grief.
I do not soothe it.
Sometimes I even
poke and prod it.
Bleed it a little.I hold my grief tight,
with gritted teeth.
I do not soothe it
straight away.I hold my grief.
I watch it heave.
I feel it beating.
It's a serene pain.
I do not soothe it.
Not straight away.I hold my grief.
I feel the convection
of its sharp inhales.
I do not soothe it.I hold my grief tight.
I hold it.
Split you open just to see what you tasted like.Bitter disappointment.There's nothing left.
There's nothing left.
There's nothing left.
There's nothing left.It's pointless to fight.
You should have expected this.I will always let you down.I am even less than what you see.
I am nothing underneath.A scarred lump of flesh,
a bastion of impurity.I am about as
deep as a trench.I will only disappoint you.
We are all writhing spasms of offal.No immortalities are
ever really offered.
My heart's a leather rind
stuck between your teeth.Chew me up.
Pull me apart.Waste not, want not. Eat.
O, sour sickly taste,
only in my head.O, sweet soundless lullaby,
sing me to sleep.Send me across this ephemeral plane.
Deliver me unto the deepest ocean.Fill me with your panacea.O, Helios;
Take my flight.
Take this away.Fill every crevice with wax.Take deep breaths.
Take deep breaths.
Destroy myself to avoid pain.
Destroy myself to avoid blame.It doesn't really help, though.
It doesn't really help, does it?Suicidal is such an ugly word.
I'm just homesick for a better time.They're going to have to repaint the
walls and recarpet the floor.or just
vacate
relocate.
I long to feel the warmth in
my chest and stomach again.To the core, the pit, the pyre.
Everything is rotten and heavy.
Burdensome, burning.All feels destined to be ash.I have suppressed all my joys
and that which I have held dear.Now these things have grown so obscure that
I am beginning to forget them altogether.I have drowned out the light.
I am losing what I've found of myself.
Been sleepwalking most of the year.Feeling the time blur by.
I woke up today, saw myself again, clearer.
I'm dreadful, sure, and I'm pretty much all the way dead. But I wasn't always like this. I wasn't ever a machine, running on fumes, trying so hard to feel something, anything at all.
I am at the logical end of my desperation.
The illness has run through the stages.And I have been left with some brittled soul,
constant attacks, constant fire, some bloated
and diseased sadness festers inside of me.You say goodbye. You could help. Were you brought into my life to help? Could you bend through the
thin air between us and come into my head and
push away this cloud forever?Do you know some real truth?
Some gold-plated word that will heal?Further down into the silence and terror.
You could not know how I came to you for warmth.
I did not tell you how I nestled in a tomb of blankets and thought of the heat of your body
pressed up against mine.You didn't know. It wasn’t your fault.
You had no way of knowing, no score to keep,
no way to remain. I would not tell you.You had no way of knowing.
We are terrible for each other,
and yes, we are a disaster.But tell me your heart
doesn't race for a hurricane
or a burning building.I'd rather die terrified
than live forever.There are those nights where
I bump into strangers on the streets.
Where I need you to take
my hair in your fist.Or a car to hit me.
Anything.
On nights like these
I would just disappear,
if it weren't for your love.Like nails in my feet.
It doesn't take much cruelty
to make people afraid
of your kindness.
The self abandons the self.Picks a strange place to die, nestled
in the garbage of the construct,
lapping up the blood, pouring from
the seams of the consciousness.
Not the first time the self has cracked.The mania, the shifts, the broken reality,
the first time the flight of the self has
flung far enough from the body.The self, the self that does not belong,
the part of the half, becomes the whole.The self abandons the self.
A dead thing ripped upon by
the birds, tossing up flesh,
the carcass providing, a
heavy thing set upon the
chest, cracking the lungs, a
ritual crushing, a sharp thing
cut up on the flesh, the holy
blood letting, a dead god
flayed out on the rock,
Innards gulped up like stew,
a new moon rises over the
world, a new hellish
pantheon made for us.
I love you the way
a knife loves a heart
the way a bomb
loves a crowd.The way your mother
warned you about,
essentially.
And after some
further consideration,I still can't think
of a single thingI don't want to do to you.
It has been so cold,
and I have felt it all.My fingers have been whipped
by rain, and the dull,
deep ache of winter
has settled
deep inside.Whatever self is left rises, steaming, vapor,
and escapes through my dumb, open mouth.Patient, you live inside of my skull.That inner sanctum, the “voice in the head,”
The manifestation of my foul constructs.
Your hands are frozen, like mine.
Our lips are numb, and silent.
Patient, we should have read the warnings.Frozen inaction, neglect, unable
to help rescue the self from
a break, a break of the mind,
the movement from calm dreams
to a manic propulsion towards destruction.Never sudden like a heart attack,
or a car accident.Always something gradual, building,
a foehn wind, a basket of dry flames.
Ominous, large, looming, silent.Then the spark. Then the break.
And I will lash out against the good,
and I will devour kindness, andI will consume the charity, and
I will twist the words of the healers
and break them apart.
And I will do these things
to push against the crushing wave
of my own desires.I will become worse
to avoid confronting this
festering sickness inside of me.
When I finally lose touch
with reality, I hope I go all
conspiracy theory, tinfoil-hat
delusional.Not the "He can change"delusional
And I will do these things
to push against the crushing wave
of my own desires.I will become worse
to avoid confronting this
festering sickness inside of me.