i steam through the night, angered and restless and bored with no where to vent, no safe place to let it go. i hunger and crack and feel uncontrollably spoiled and privileged. she comes to me in the night, children asleep, exhausted and lonely. i’ve missed you, she says.
i miss everyone.
she holds me
it can be difficult, you must, you must not turn away. you must turn to them, you must turn to the light.
you must learn, she says, to see how others see you. you must see the beauty others see in you.
and i try, i try, i spin and turn and fall and fail and scramble for purchase.
she holds me close. she holds me still. she holds me. she holds me.
snaggletooth
multitask multi-be, be everywhere, all the time, stretch across your lovely claws through time and space and the small of her back and the edge of her lip, snag a nail there, pull her mouth towards yours, just before piercing the skin, just before bleeding, let go and kiss her, kiss the wound before it heals.
hang time until it is over
hang time, the suspension of belief, that one crucial moment where we wait with baited breath and our lungs fill to capacity and it would be a marvel that we were still breathing if the nail wasn’t set to puncture us all.
hang time, the noose around her neck, while we wait for the trap door to drop and for her to kick at us and we toss stones against her forehead and her torso and her knees, scratched and bruised and scabbed with every lie.
hang time, where calloused fingers loosen their grip and i fall forever and ever into the mouth of this disappointment, having said it and done, over and over until raw, until my throat is hoarse from screaming your name.
hang time, all over again until it is over.
light / dark
When will there ever be peace in my heart?
When will I let go of despair, when will I find it unattractive?
You said once I was a pain junkie. I wonder if it’s a simple as that.
I am a dark soul. I think I’ve seen and done too much, and not enough of the right things.
Will you teach me how to embrace the light? Will you teach me not to be afraid of the dark?
ever real
it is difficult to let go of an addiction, particularly when it is sprung from self destruction, when the addiction is to self destruct, to self mutilate. a denial of happiness. i tell her in the dark, i need to tell you this, i need to tell you that you are real, the only ever real thing i have ever had.
in the dark, untouched
i scramble in the dark, i make myself up. every instance, another me, another entanglement, something else i cannot sustain. i scramble my brains over a cold skillet, nothing cooks. nothing even simmers. i grow stale. i am lost, i make myself up, ten fold, twenty fold. the need to disappear, overwhelming. to not be, to erase myself, to obliterate. not out of malice, not to destroy, to create anew. blank slate, dig up even the foundation. there is no foundation, only dirt. it’s all been built upon dirt, mud, shaky ground. i cannot sustain, i scramble.
i have never been reached, i have yet to be touched by another person. i have yet to be moved. i am always looking for a way out. i am always looking to not be.
happy nothing drowning
“whatever will be willed of me”
-tool, “lateralus”
throughout and through, thrown out and pitched, the wave and the tide and the undertow, relax, let go, she said, let it go, she said, she kissed me hard on the mouth and my teeth hurt, my gums bled and i tasted her as a mixture of blood and rage and the longing of every man that crossed her, of every longing i ever had that was denied and i felt nothing but the drowning even though i knew the shore was near, even though i knew the sun was above me, even though i knew which direction to go, i felt nothing, i felt peace, i felt happy as nothing at all.
a fiction of you: once thought beautiful
there is of course, a mad almost feverish magic to writing, to this, to you in the dark sleeping. as if. as if time begins and ends here, between each letter, then ruptures before the next word. you inhale, your torso gently rises, life sprung anew, blood coursing through veins, then exhale, the leaving of everything, silence and stillness. until the next word, the next breath. enraptured i write with bitter hands that had once held, what, our child? there were never any children. only the denial of children, only the thorn of reaching out for something we once thought beautiful but could never possess.
options
There is no reset button, there is no way to go back in time and undo the damage before it even began. I do not know what to do, and if I delve into it too deeply, I feel as if I might go mad. But I cannot. There are children, there are bills, there are frail and fragile human beings involved that I am afraid to reach out to. The only option is to disconnect. The only option is to stop.