i'll make it to the moon if i have to crawl

Lightweight! Only 2.3 pounds! Make up to four pieces of toast in 30 minutes! Runs off any laptop's USB port!

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here and everywhere

the knife is dull, your hands unfamiliar and clumsy, my hands too small, far away, unwelcome

the flesh yields in a puff of dust moldy at the core, mottled green and grey citrus juice and pulp evacuating across the kitchen counter 

my spine spasms, you salivate involuntarily, a paper towel swipes away residual pulp, revealing forbearing skin unscarred, untouched

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fault line

dawn claws through midnight’s curtain, scarlet talons corrupting the dark velvet to caress your bare chest. you wake in a world blanketed by dust and fog, cottonmouthed and glassy-eyed, oriented to a place and time that is not your own.

are things as they should be? some time before (hours? days?) your silicon mind broke itself in two as your consciousness was ripped away. its remnants produced feeble sparks that danced at the edges of your empty gaze: some light to save you from the darkness that threatened to dissolve you. 

the sparks linger, but the darkness abates in the yellow light. now, the air is thick and unwieldy in your throat, blackening your mouth, heavy in the deepest caverns of your lungs. now, you wipe carbon ash and silicon dust off the mirror to reveal a face that is as foreign as it is familiar own, its fishhook mouth stained red. your name hesitates on the tip of this imposter’s tongue as you fumble for a washcloth. the blood and dust wash mostly away; their pigments leave shadows that linger on your pale skin. 

there is no safety in this imposter’s world. the body is coated with a fine layer of debris from the fallout; you set the shower to the hottest it can go and step in, revealing tender pink skin underneath the dust and ash. atom by atom, the mind’s motheaten cortex begins to restore itself; you palpate the thin iridescent membrane that holds back the flood and wonder. blood and ash swirl down the drain. 

are things as they should be?

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LOST AT SEA

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a headache

shameful: wipe away the thick dust that rained from your wasted body. your sorrow, curdled on the windowsill. your plants, wilting. your skin too thin, your bones too sharp, broken glass against canvas. 

uncouth: ugly. an overripe plum begs to be torn apart. your cheek, tender and decaying against the sidewalk of your lover’s palm. mercy in the throes of august heat.

an exquisite form of nausea: love is a pickaxe through your left temple, your eyes clouded with the nacre of something unyielding. it is your skin forever scarred by chemical burns. it is your heart, cut up into bite-sized pieces and skewered by toothpicks, still pleading blissful ignorance.

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the secret life of the manic depressive, part II

i. two years have passed. life finds you washed up on a beach, your lungs swollen with seawater and your skin crusted with salt, white like a second-degree burn. the tide pulls gently at your toes, and you try not to think about how warm the water feels.

ii. your heart is the first thing to come back. it thaws like a freezer-burnt strawberry, tender and leaking- painful to touch- but just as red and plump as ever. you are so much more capable of love. you don’t know if you are as deserving.

iii. you do laundry, make breakfast, change your clothes, brush your teeth (not necessarily in that order). letters come for you in the mail and you read them over orange juice and two white pills. bit by bit, the salt flakes off, the new skin pink and vulnerable. you can allow yourself to be touched again.

iv. there are other places to find warmth, now. you think of the red clay and clementine flesh of summer, the dog hair and mashed potatoes of christmas day. in winters, the far-away glow from your living-room window pours out through the icy nights like a lighthouse, beckoning you home from a mile away.

v. you’re going to get there. honest to god, you are.

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december 2 2015

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celibacy

the merciful thing- a peach pit that weighs heavy in your stomach, the whisper that echoes through an empty room- something to call yours, somewhere to belong

my sickly kindness, my shame. chapped lips that smacked together,  birch bark stripped away from the base of the tree: my skin strips of paper between your fingers, white linens on the clothesline, bleaching clean in the sun

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i love you like the river

the wind blows through you in all the wrong places, eats at you from the outside in and makes you sick, makes you beg

you swallow the knife, your chest pleading to be cracked open black and bruising beneath my hands, timid and too cold

in the sunset, there is your body, brambly and grey, frosted with salt and calcium, then there is the sidewalk

and my fingers, twisted into wrought-iron barbs, hollow for you

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take me home, please

jack, the pastor’s son, killed himself in his dorm first year, they found him two days later when the hall started to smell, the university dedicated a tree in his honor, now there’s a ‘mental health awareness’ organization named after him, do you think he died “in vain”?

i’m looking for a plan. i’m looking for a new ocean, this one’s all dried up, i’m looking for somewhere warmer, send me a text if you have any leads, for fuck’s sake this has gotten out of hand.

the leaves are falling off now. my philosophy professor reminds me that god could be all powerful or all-loving but not both, reminds me to hold your hand tight as i explain that god could love me or he could love you but not both of us simultaneously or together

the salt flats go on forever, i’m hungry, i’m sad like a thousand cliches, i’m the typewriter with sixteen broken keys, i’m 8 different definitions of the word “body”, things are sure going to be ok one day but not necessarily for me,

are you sitting down? i’ve got some bad news

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the difference between now and then

alex laughs too loud and too long like she really wants to prove she’s happy cassie promises things will be better tomorrow, next month, next year mike’s been going through some tough stuff for too long and his legs seem longer, somehow

i am hanging on until morning

i lost two pounds in nine days i’m alright

it’s okay

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terror management II

let’s pretend nothing’s changed let’s pretend i’m ok and you’re ok and everything is going to be fine let’s braid our fingers together and promise to never ever let go

i’m hanging my head out the window of mike’s honda civic, hurtling towards a future i don’t want at exactly 72 kilometers per hour beside me jen is yelling, like “oh shit, oh jesus fucking shit, oh christ” over and over like she’s dying and then she’s puking on my lap and that’s ok

i’m stopping the clock right here it’s something different and i’m ok with being afraid like this i’m ok with loving you away from me and beer that lingers like your perfume smells, like two fingers against the base of my tongue, in a good way, i swear,

i love your crooked hands so what if the airbags don’t deploy? i’m in the grass, i’m drunk, i’m thinking of you

wake me up if you’re feeling lonely i’ll be there soon, i promise

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synestheses replied to your post:i know most of my poetry has been pretty heavy in...

i learned something new today

it is my secret shame

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i know most of my poetry has been pretty heavy in the past year or so but if you ever find yourself making the mistake of taking me seriously, please remember that before i wrote poetry i wrote sherlock fanfiction

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the morning after

it’s an overripe plum dripping with juice, sticky on your chin, out of season / it’s pink skin, warm-to-the-touch and raw, swaddled by cotton balls / it’s pools of salt that drain onto your lap, into your oatmeal

it’s a $3 bus ride and a plastic bracelet that aggravates the skin on the inside of your wrist / it’s your blood, suspiciously and betrayingly red as it flows back into the IV line / it’s your body, infuriatingly and maddeningly healthy beneath the doctor’s hands / it’s the toddler in the next room over, crying her eyes out- she’s got meningitis

it’s a $28 taxi ride home / it’s chipping your way through the ice and mud and leaves, it’s digging a deep hole / it’s the clay and silt hardened with frost, unyielding / it’s burying your suicide note in the backyard, beneath the maple tree, fingers clumsy with cold and dirt / it’s the breath that curdles hard and fast in the november air, mocking you

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what a lot of people dont understand about depression treatment is that being “happy” isn’t always the end goal. sometimes it’s just getting to a point where you’re “safe” and don’t want to kill yourself anymore and the doctors consider that a huge success! the sadness doesn’t always really go away, the existential dread is still there, you’re just ok with it being a presence in your life. i still walk outside in thunderstorms like “hey wouldn’t it be interesting to die this way?” but that’s objectively an improvement over trying to fling myself off a roof right? so sometimes people tell you “it will get better” and i guess technically that is true but i just want people to understand that “better” doesn’t always mean “good”

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the overwhelming terror the doctors won’t stop talking about

the spittle foaming against a shriveled lip, the rasp and rattle of mucus in the shower drain-

the blood stops coming but your heart plunges on without you and i am pressing my face against the glass, sterile smoke rolling out from my lungs, fingers thin and wavering

i am taking in a breath and wiping hair out of my eyes, cracking my teeth on the vapor, smoothing away the creases of your skin, of the bedsheets

i am begging your forgiveness i am begging you to understand

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i don’t get it but i want to

like the way the fog rolls over the hill, like the scab you can’t help but pick clean

i am chasing my pain around in circles and i am chasing my pain around circles and i want it to be over

i am drunk in the bathtub and i am appealing to god’s consistency and i am trying to clear the smoke out of my hair, the tar off my cheeks

my best friend doesn’t answer the phone anymore and my heart is made of wax paper 

i want it to be over