These days,
you don’t talk to anyone.
You hear the offers,
and you refuse to take them,
refuse to give anyone
the satisfaction
of helping.

[What could they do,
what could they say?]

These days,
you don’t reach out
reply as much as you have to
when approached,
and disappear into dissociation again.

You don’t feel bad,
you don’t feel sad,
you don’t feel.

Only tell yourself that
they don’t need you
and you don’t need them.

You’re alone.

But not lonely.
Your brain is home to a chorus,
there’s never a dull moment.

How could you ever be alone
with so many voices in your head?

There’s the querulous one of anxiety with her constant,
whatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoido?

The heavy, lumbering one of depression, who only mumbles,
Who cares? None of this matters.

There is the babble of Mombrain,
a hodge podge of toxic sludge that
at this point,
is not cruel but
almost comical:
You’reuglystupidbadloserfreaksocialmisfitliarliarliarug­lystupidbaddesperatepatheticracistunfeelingcoldfuckyouyoulazyburd­enonsocietyfuckyou.

There is the matter of fact one of Logic Brain.
She is the one who
has to do damage control, works overtime to
make you appear Sane, Articulate,  Good, Better.

She is the one who guides you through
every
single
action.

Get out of bed.
Now brush your teeth.
Now make the bed.
Now take a shower.
Now put on clothes,
Now eat - you have to eat multiple meals.
Now take your meds, don’t be a child.
You are going to get things done today.
You will be Fine.

But the whisper
is the one that interests you,
scares you,
thrills you the most.

She's the one you never shut down.

She is cool, suave.
You can never see her, of course,
but she is the girl you could never be.
She is
so close,
so seductive -
just                  out of reach.
She breathes into your ear:
crash the car,
jump on the tracks,
fly off the bridge,
stab yourself to watch the blood,
drink the nail polish remover,
chug a whole bottle of whiskey
and down some pills,
just like the old days,
remember the old days,
you were sure you would die?
You can still Do It.

Ideation always whispers,
but the whispers are so loud,
feel so
right.

She tells you:
You think I’ll disappear, but
you and I,
we’ll always be going steady,
I’m not like those other girls,
the ones who rip out your heart,
who never say sorry when they need to,
who use you and expect so much and
leave when they’re done.
Baby, with me
there will never be any surprises
no heartbreak,
no drama,
no manipulation
no uncertainty.

*Baby,
I will never leave you,
I am the one constant.
Come into my arms,
let me hold you tight
and never let you go.

I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, I should leave, I'm not good, why do you like me, she'd parrot again and again, coming and going and coming and going and I will love this love forever and I don't want to lose you and soul mates and we're going to be okay and we're safe to each other and sorry, sorry, sorry and you should abandon me and coming and going and stop calling yourself honest, and are you sure you have bpd, and coming and going and one day there are no more sorrys and coming and going and I can't take this and coming and eventually

going.

"Here are some snippets and poetry I wrote" my ex says in an email some days after I've drunkenly reinitiated contact with them after a year of nothing and the "snippets" go back and back and back, 2015, 2014, 2013, and we both confess to having read each other's blog and they will end up refollowing me on every blog they have which is all well and good but I am still scared and wondering why I seem to always go where I don't belong, why I am always trying to open some Pandora's box and they have said they never get over anyone, they have called me their muse and I want to tell them that I am not their muse, I am only myself, my best friend tells me to be distant with them after I tell her about the drama with them that I managed to handle and I had started writing a poem to them but now I think I'll just close the unsaved document, I only sent them one poem but I don't want to send any more, it would only encourage them, maybe encourage me and that's all I ever do - encourage people who end up scaring and hurting me, but hey at least I get content from all of it.

"I miss you" ze tells me, ze sends me hearts and initiates contact and likes every stupid thing I ever post on Facebook, and when we're around each other everything is fine, and my best friend tells me ze would date me if I let hir but I can't do it, I can't casually date, not a white person and not now, not after all I've dealt with, I think I just want to be alone forever now, and ze is so nice to me but I just can't reciprocate when we are not in the same room, and I don't believe hir is really autistic or bpd and I never know why, and ze is the best of all of hir anarqueer friends but there is something so off about all of them and they are good entertainment from afar but these are the kinds of people I would have been so jealous of when I was still at smith and always hurting from my perpetual anonymity among the hipsters I realized I would never be a part of, and I have accepted that I will always be invisible among white hipsterqueers but sometimes it still hurts, "community" is ******* and I don't believe it could ever exist for me, but that doesn't mean that I don't sometimes want it desperately.

"Let's go to Tuesgays," my best friend announced last night, and I roused myself up because I knew she wanted to go and wouldn't go without me, she told me as much when we were walking in the dark trying to find the club, and I gathered up all the bits of naivety and hope and the maybe it will be okay amidst all the fear and fatigue and I assembled the bits into a shoddy structure that blew away an hour later and I'm sure I ruined the night but she didn't tell me, and she bought me pizza but the pizza was too much and I don't want to perform at an open mic and I don't want to spend money and I don't want to drink but I do anyway and I don't know why I do all these things I don't like doing, building all these unstable structures that just fall down in the end, and I don't know what's wrong, it's not her fault, I just wish I were dead.

"So fill me in on these last five years. How's life?" I didn't respond to the old high school friend who I wasn't even particularly close with them and once I thought it would be cool to reconnect with friends in high school but every time they ever try to contact me now all I think is "go away, go away, go away," and it's more intense with men, he texts me this morning, days after I delete the text, says, "You were the first person that ever wrote on my wall on facebook, remember? I never forgot that," as if that's supposed to make me feel something, what I want to say is "hi I'm gay and crazy and not the person who wrote on your wall in 2007 and I don't know what the point is in contacting me," but I will hold my tongue because I can't say these things, I will continue to not reply, just like I don't reply to the old men I meet who send me emails or add me on Facebook because maybe I am their only friend and it's not their fault, it's mine for talking, mine for trusting, for giving away my email and poetry so willingly, always forgetting that slightly sick feeling I get afterwords, that's what being uncomfortable is, that feeling that something is wrong, wrong, wrong, and you're stuck and it's too late to go back but something is wrong and you can't put your finger on what is wrong, what is wrong, what is wrong with you, why can't you be nicer to the people around you, why are you writing this at all, stop feeling this anxious, stop feeling bad for no reason, stop feeling

uncomfortable.

in awe of the marginalized
in awe of the QTPOC
in awe of the survivors
in awe of the femmes
in awe of the fat
in awe of the trans/gender non conforming
in awe of the creators
in awe of the disabled
in awe of the ones who don’t/won’t/can’t recover
in awe of the ones the world is trying to shut up, lock down
in awe of the ones who didn’t make it
in awe of the ones who did
in awe of all of us

I
love
us

I wake up late
[it's always too late these days]
Yawn and the day yawns wide open,
whispers: "oh, but think of all the things you could do."
I don't much care for this life:
this boredom,
this suffering,
these atrocities,
but that whisper propels me up
like the shock of an alarm clock:

again, again, again.

Oh Death,
you my favorite card,
you my wildest courtship,
you who broke me open,
coaxed me into spilling my secrets,
and now,
you are gone,
leaving wreckage behind.

But wreckage is not
annihilation.

Oh Death,
you paved the way
for things I never thought possible,
razed the worst to the ground,
without even knowing.
I can feel the seeds of something
new and good
spring up within me.

Oh Death,
I don’t want to die.

They strung me up.
Not by the neck,
that would be
too quick.

No.
They intended
a slow torture for me,
bound one foot,
bound my arms.

I heard a voice:
Escape is possible
if you want it.

And I was alone.

At first I struggled.
Swayed back and forth
from the wind, and the weather and the
pain,
to no avail.

But eventually,
I learnt to just

Stop.

If this was my life,
So be it.
I was not going to provide
a show of my misery
to any God.

I saved my energy,
learnt to live with seeing the world
pass me by,
learnt to see things
from a different perspective.

Torture?
This was nice,
relaxing even,
I could hardly feel the pain,
could block it out
almost entirely.

Perhaps this is what I wanted
all along -
an eternal break.

Fool that I was,
I failed to realize
the torture was not physical
but mental.

Slowly I grew bored
in contemplation,
in limbo,
in apathy,
in atrophy.

I remembered the voice:
escape is possible,
I remembered
everything I wanted to do
everything I still yearned to do.

All the beauty and the goodness
and the possibilities of Life
made me ache,
and I could not block it out.

Suddenly I saw:
this was not torture
but a test.

My time of suspension is up,
These are but ropes,
not chains.

I know the way out,
and I am not afraid.

There is work to be done.

My philosophy has always been simple:
Don’t ask
Don’t tell.

I am the expert at lying
by omission.
No,
not lying exactly,
but
wouldn’t you agree
that what you don’t know
can’t hurt you?

Don’t worry about me,
I’m Fine,
always fine.
I can handle myself,
I always have.

Feelings?
I don’t know what you are talking about,
I am a robot,
feelings simply don’t
compute.
You’re knocking at the wrong door.
I have nothing to tell you,
[not anymore.]

Look a bird!
I can manipulate any conversation
away from me,
just by distraction.
The trick is to let people
talk and talk and talk and
forget,
so I can check out.

No one knows the difference,
and I am called a good listener
for doing nothing.
No harm done.
All anyone needs is a blank slate
to talk at.
I can fill that role.

Honesty?
Don’t talk to me about honesty,
what good does it do?
Why should I be honest?
It’s no one’s business anyway.

My philosophy has always been simple:
Don’t ask,
Don’t tell.