Dysphoria blossoming and spreading
such beauty it has to show me
grown with love from the very soil of me
hot and wet, rich and black.
I am lost in the garden of it,
and though my skin is pricked and bloody,
and though my bare feet are achy and torn,
I sink my toes into the earth,
And I am glad to be here.
I apologize deeply to you for your pain.
or mine. I don't know which is
which of if there is even a line.
I'm sorry for the way my mental health
crisis has become your embodied sense of anguish
Stone in my chest. spiked and barbed.
splattered in my blood like lingerie.
I turned this part of myself over and found
that the hardest, deadest part of me was
teeming with all the life I had rejected.
No longer my own but vibrant and ferocious
It scattered in the light, and went to ground
again. And now I can't close my eyes
because I can feel it on my skin, hear it in the
echo of my own footsteps.
My voice teems with insects
Still the stone in my chest sits heavy. Dead,
hard thing to remind me that I am still alive.
That my dearest companion has lived
"i am still alive," you tell me. "but it will not always be so."
"I am still alive," you say with teeth gritted and blood on your lips.
"I am still alive." while anguish courses through you thicker than blood or air.
"I am still alive." you say in the face of my paltry offerings.
"I am still alive, but it will not always be so." meanwhile I hunger with no mouth. I yearn to see without eyes. I dream of touch, but all I can feel is the absence of what should be.
I wish I believed in reincarnation. I wish I believed I could try again in the next life instead. I wish that to simply be was not a test of courage or a feat of strength.
And yet still I am alive. My body, my companion, my helper, my friend. My most attendant lover. My most loving attendant. Though I hunger and thirst, I am happiest in your embrace, and tired as I am, I need only what you can give me.