Void of self
Void of this self, ejected
Repress this
And come across it later.

Don't.

Petroleum papers.

Sometimes I want this candle to burn too quick
And ***** my flame.

You're the Apple of my eye, the laces of my shoes, the breath of calm after an anxiety attack or heavy cry. You're the hand on my leg telling me I'm safe, the magnet which magnetised the needle in my homemade compass. You're the net of a dreamcatcher, the final **** after a long and exhausting hunt. You're the sensation of being warm and naked after a cold and wet day out in the snow, you're the report card with straight A's. You're there toe beans of a cute cat and the contagious laughter of a newborn too naive to realize that everyone in the room is only laughing because they keep laughing harder, the positive feedback loop exhausted by cheeks too tired to smile and a diaphragm too used to move.

The sensation of being tucked in, but not too tight. The phenomenon of waking up in your bed because you passed out on the couch and your dad carried you in.

You're the dream where you fall in love and everything is perfect and great, but when you wake up you carry over that charm into your day to day life and everything starts to go your way. You're the fortune cookie with a fortune of the numbers 3,4,8,17,20,26,38,48,70 and the phrase saying "your long held-onto grievances will vanish soon, you will find your peace."

You are the learning, growing pupil of the Master of the Way. You are the concept of fairness and rightfulness, of non-ownership and laissez-faire government and home. You are the beacon, cooking a warm meal at the stove, so tuned into her world. You are the day dream, where the ordinary melts and the extraordinary takes over our surroundings and enchants our creativity while boosting and fanning that little flame in our hearts that keeps us going.

You are the first kiss of morning, with morning breath so stagnant from an unexpected ****** release at 4 am and an explosion of positive neurotransmitters, the development of trust in each other's arms. You are the attempt to synchronize heartbeats in a very tight spooning position. You paint the image of our energies moving in complex shapes before entering the other, circling inside and maturing, then entering back into the other. The ouroboros of emotion and trust and love.

You're what I see when I close my eyes, and you're what I want to see when I open them. You're the concept of someone I can truly let be. The independent, growing college girl with her whole life adventure ahead of her.

You're the angel on my shoulder which speaks to me words of reason and progress and helps me ignore this rotten goblin on the other shoulder. You're the voice I hear say "I really like them, honestly," when I see tracers in my vision.

You're a lighthouse in my mind. One safe thought, one place I can escape to for safety. But that's not really you, it's just my concept of you and my memories. But sometimes just that thought is enough to fuel it, because I'll be thinking of you more than I actually see you and I need to find the best way to deal with both.

I don't want to put you on some unreasonable pedestal and I don't think I have. I only truly mean like a third of what I said about the poetic "you are"s, because it would be unreasonably romantic to truly believe most of that. But I believe it in spirit and that's what matters.

You're the voice whispering me to sleep, and the reason I don't always have to wear ear plugs any more. You're the person I imagine running their fingers up my arms and into my hair when I watch ASMR vidoes. You trigger my ASMR and almost no one before you has been so successful in doing so. My body responds to you naturally in burst and quivers of euphoria and satisfaction, the curiousity of how you can pleasure and tingle me and how I can please you.

Rubbing your back and shoulders, popping your back ever so slightly, exploring the surface of your skin in every area. I want to learn and map your topography and dimensions and watch those change gradually over time as you mature into this yogi goddess with such a brain it's astounding.

You inspire me. You're such a hard worker and you're so much further than your circumstances could have put you. You're so strong Zo. Even if you feel like you're breaking sometimes, you're handling the pressure better than I ever could.

I'm grateful for my time with you, but I'm even more grateful for the peace you've helped bring to my tumultuous mind.

I hope you're getting just the most wonderful sleep. Dreaming of forgotten kindoms, songs never heard, places and euphorias never felt or synchronized with. You're a good person.

Drip
     Drip
       Drip
ThisDemon comes for me.

Dragging his Demon feet,
     scrrrrrrrrrrtch-. scrrrrrrrrrrrtch.*
Moving so ever slower, creeping- *CRAWLING FOR ME.

//He's coming for me. I know it.//

A Paw so animal in nature, he's Here for ME.
one bad habit too far...

Lucifer is*
     *Coming

This egg,
Growing and incubated
Has been left cold and seeking,
Grasping at any branch,
Any hand
Any heat.

The apricot tree,
So solemn in its art of creation,
Yielding fruit by square yard,
And flower blossom come spring
Holding no pleasure in its perception.

If I am the apricot tree in the fields at dawn,
You are the ladder,
The picker,
The cook,
The sugar and pan
And the jar of apricot jam,

Preserved in its perfection
For hungry mouth and seeking hands
To endulge in, come harvest.
You are the countertop in the kitchen
And the residue of spills upon it,
Caused so carefree by fingers excited
To savor God's gift
Of orange fruit
And good will.

You are the warm home
Occupied by voices and laughter
And children so eager for the day
Their screams of joy echo each room.

You are the eyes onlooking
From inside the car,
Gazing out a moving window
At the bountiful apricot blossoms,
You are the artist and beholder,
The eyes of beauty
Which turn the tree's mundane
And ordinary life
Into poetry and light of human love.
The botanist, the lover of fruit and flesh,
Picking perfect apricots,
Plucking them not only at pure ripe
But all season,
For the sake of texture and sweet.

For the tree,
Bearing fruit and blossom
Has transcended from routine
To holiday.

Such a pleasure,
Being plucked and picked,
Pleased and appreciated in true apricot
Passion.

The tree loves the lover,
And the lover loves the tree.

"Listen to her read poems in French."

Is this too specific?
I simply want to hear her voice.

Resting my head on your lap was magic,
Listening to all your syllables
And silent letters.
Watching your lips
So carefully as you tongued
The notes of a forgotten poem.
You turned words that I can read into
The song of a choir
And the language of romance,
I could hear Camus and Descartes
In your voice,
I could hear the timbre of your tongue
Embody the tortured author's pleas.

I could hear your voice
And watch you make art
With lips so red from kissing.
And I fell in love with it.

"Listen to her read poems in French."
Has been amended to
"Listen to her speak."

A suit of colored feather
Flamingo toucan tux
I wear my joy
For all to see,

Upon my skin
Rests dozens
Of hundreds
Of emotion.

My blue wings,
Confetti color paper,
Scribble the sorrow
In Crayola,

And I sign my name
In red,
So red macaw
This piercing beak pen
Out and out and out again,
Writing my name in red.

My dozens, my hundreds,
My span of feather,
Has meant to me
My dozens, my hundreds,
My life of emotion,

So **** your feathers,
Raise your pointed head,
Let scream these colors
And wear them so properly again,
Stand here today
To let them see
This unspoken part of pain.

So glad I can always escape to my dreams
Away from these people and away from these things,
Somewhere safer, unimaginable,
Somewhere where my cup isn't always full
     But at least it's happy.

I can get what I want from waking life,
By exploring my sleeping life,
The only problem is when I wake
I've kind of got a choice to make,
Is it better to live or better to let it pass,
     To sedate myself and live euphorias
     Or wake every day to the heartbreak, turmoil and inhumanities of the waking world.

I guess we'll see.

Little snowshoe hare
Leaving fresh tracks in the snow
Spring is on the way.

Knuckles white, steering the road to nowhere
Decidedly driving
To coffee.
Cruising familiar veins of an old city,
E-brake fishtailing every corner
He smiles.
He smiles and laughs like God herself is watching
Bobbing his head and dancing to his CDs
Alone on these streets.

I would trade it all to again feel this bliss.
Seventeen years old, king of his world,
Filling the void left by mental despair
And a wronged childhood
With women and night drives.
Ignorantly answering all of life's questions
So content with his child philosophies
And childish love,
And childish kisses,
And childish regrets.
Romanticizing the thoughts his dragons gave him,
Turning the scars on his arm into the rungs of a ladder,
Climbing up and past them,
Leaping the fences of mania,
And free falling into his insanities.

He was the king of his world,
Seventeen.

Golem, gatekeeper
He played some riddles for me,
I've sat and pondered for weeks.
Finally am answer came to thought
Through my chaotic mind,
Through wretched things I brought,
He let me in.

The treasure within,
Beyond any concept previous;
My Holy Grail
With wine to sip
And God to feel.
I'm glad I didn't fail.

A lesson in denial
This insanity blanket cover,
(()) mind in constant spiral
Ignoring (()) recover
Y.

Swallowing water,
((deepthroating it rather))
(()) drowning in fishes,
They wither, they splatter,
((They try to climb ladders))
((Dumb fish))
.

Relativity doesn't
Mean to much to (())
Sinister things
And sinister (())
.

(()) swallow coal and ash
And foals and moles,
Vore (()) and gore (())
No placety of safet
Y.

No sleep no eat
No (()) no sea,
Have a seat or two or three
Welcome to insanit
Y.

A spool of yarn,
Two ways to core;
The patient, kind unraveling,
Using all thread to warm;
Or
The knife.
A short path, exposing much
But sacrificing more.

I want to say I can't do it
But I can.
I know I can make it
I just wish I couldn't.
I wish it was too much
And I'd end it all.
Too healthy for my own good
Too unhealthy for the same.

I've described myself as
A conglomerate of hands and arms
Reaching out and grabbing
At everything within reach.
Constantly reaching and searching for more,
For the answer
For comfort or love or knowledge,
Or any abuse to make me forget about
This ****** up world and my ****** up psyche.
Hands, grabbing, reaching
Never being grasped.

Arpeggios
Of imprisoned frustration,
Finally leaking out
In notes and tones so pure,
Steel strings.

Comfort.

These back country roads highlight the presence of nothingness.
Pushing through murky thoughts of
Inexistence, burning the smoke of loneliness and impotence.
Alone with myself.

Today I'm thankful
For those who pushed me
Those who provoked me
Those who forced me
To write.

Every day
This sun rises
And shines light upon our mistakes.
Conglomerate of neat and nasty people.
Hydrogen doesn't care.

The corner store says she smells like
"Pine tree" scented candle,
But to me she smells like
A decent bet,
And a couple skipped heart beats.

A cycle of

Egg
Larvae
Pupae
Moth.

To the flame and then again.

Does Prometheus enjoy his struggle,
Having tasked an eternity?

Rivers of red,
Shallow display of blood
Mixing with soil and sand
Flowing down
Always down.

A world of red blood
And red rivers.

Apples
And
Cigarettes

Go so well together.
The fruit of death
And the sower of it.

Call this purgatory
But it's not quite.

It's a balance between
Heaven
And
Hell.

Heaven from these waking and sleeping moments
Blanketed in your warmth
In your books and hair
And skin.
Showered with love
Cleaned by it
And showing true selves.
No puppetry.

And Hell
For all the same reasons gone.
No infinities
No blankets of lasting warmth.
All safety being yanked from me upon sunrise,
The ouroboros dwindling
And anxiety of next day.
To lose your libraries, your sheets, your smell and touch
In one instant.

Heaven AND Hell.
Forever sewing themselves into these moments.
Sine and Cosine.
The snake of comfort.

My librarian.
So calculated
Controlled
Controlling
Similar.
She's decided.
I'm decided.

Synched.

Old memories
Of touch and feel
Of pick and peel
And pray and kneel.

Old sensations
Of you and me
Of us and we
And watch and see.

Dusty
     Old
          Memories.
Like classics
In a library.

Tucked away
For a later date.

Adenosine fueling me behind the scenes
Lysergic crystals
Explosions, shrapnel shredding
Tearing, digging inside me
Severed limbs
Severed parts of me
Left behind.

Born again.

Cross wires
And whine
Nothing is easy enough.

Content here
With my coffee
My biscuit
And my cream,
By the sea.

As one branch forks
Into two branches,
Thoughts do the same.

Fractals of existence,
Permanently deepening
The roots of experimenting.

Always thinking,
Always solving
And resolving.

The gray in my brain
Is really just a busy
Head
Of
Cauliflower.

The army gathered,
Horde of rotting lepers
Severed limbs,
Of snatched hearts
And missing gray,
Skulls opened by time;
Decay.

The gates they charge,
Making more of their own.

Always more dead,
Always more melted brain
And dark, dry hearts.

Strength in numbers,
Defining morality,
Defining normality.

These normal
Zombies
Gather.

These normal
People
Gather.

I put sunlight on my tongue.
It manifests inside of me,
Then explodes through my eyes.
I can see everything.

Parchment, not paper,
Some endless sentence,
We never had a period,
We never had a stop.

This daily, peaking desire
To keep writing our story,
Start the next chapter,
Put ink and blood on fiber.

You're still with me in my dreams,
And my trips.
You're still in my heart.
I can't shut up about you
And all the good. Still.

I'm a damaged vinyl record,
Playing these same verses over
And over.
But honestly,
This was my favorite part of the song.

Let's play that song

Two embers,
One flame.
Together we burn away.

Cosmoline
And steel.
Finely tuned,
Blued and forged.
This rifle works
A perfect machine.
Designed to pierce and ****
It does it job.

One cartridge
7.62x54R.
Loaded,
The bolt clicking firmly
In its place.
I smell this machine;
Gunshot residue.

I feel this weather stock,
Fraying and polished.
It feels soft in my strong grip.
I squeeze this death.

I rest it firmly against my forehead.
My heart pounds
And I breathe deep breaths.
Adrenaline.
Exhale.
I'm gone.

Cathartic dirt,
I lay.
Letting dust and bugs settle
On my skin.

Breathing damp musk,
Breathing particle air,
Skin cooled by old tile.

Embrace this darkness,
Embrace this entropy,
Give love to the chaos.

*I love it.

I want to feel like king again.

And feel loved and safe. I feel so alone and cold. Like I'm sleeping in an unenclosed barn in some tundra and the doors keep flapping open and my sleeping bag has holes and it's been years since anything besides spiders and moss has lived in here.

I feel like all the warm families and all the soft lovers have vanished and left me to my own devices. Like the last man on this cold, dead earth. I want to have purpose again. A reason to wake up and a reason to not throw a bullet through my brain.

I feel like I have asthma, or the air is so frozen it hurts my lungs. I can't breathe and my skin is starting to boil and my hair feels so unkempt and my beard just keep ******* growing no matter how many times I shave it. ******* I want everything to stop, but not freeze, I want the badness to go away and the goodness to come back.

I feel like I'm reverting. I'm devolving into the lesser person I once was, I'm losing what defined me. I want to fade away entirely or come back in full, not stay at 70% opacity and kind of just float here in limbo. I want to know that I'm not wanted, or be told that I am. I don't want to have to guess and play guessing games with life.

Being born is the most cruel gift I've ever been given. I am so very lucky to be born, such low odds of it happening, and at this golden time nonetheless, but GOD do I suffer in this golden gift. I am obliged to live a life, and a full one, but that life is inherently founded in suffering and constant war with attrition and loneliness and disease and age and heartbreak and cancer and hatred and cold. And we fight these things and it makes us happy, but we have to keep fighting and fighting and fighting for that happiness. We can't just rest and be happy because it will all start to crumble. Your money will dry up and your health will decline and you will get cancer and you will succumb to dark mental places and you will lose everyone you love if you stop fighting. So we don't have a choice we have to just KEEP FIGHTING. God, I'm sick of fighting. I'm sick of suffering for the sake of avoiding a worse suffering. I want to just float. Just put the car in cruise control and coast at a healthy spot. But I can't.

Not with my mind. Not with my wallet. Not with my heart.

Life is the cruelest luck.

I've learned to let go
Something about chronic
Spiders
And ants and bees
CRAWLING
All over me,
      It's made me care less.

You can fight all these pests,
And when your mind is frying on DPH
Or LSD or DXM,
You really have no desire to,
You don't have a choice.

You let the flies be flies
And the snakes be snakes.

We are powerless, I have learned.
I'm glad I've gone passive.

Remember that conversation we had about you being there for me,
Always
Willing to drive me to the hospital
Or nurse me when I'm sick?

I could have used you last night.

I dreamt about you again
Your hair, your skin, your safety.

We talked and blocked it all out.
It was nice.

My Fox.

My teeth are red, and white
So crimson is my blood upon them
Like roses upon snow.

Sedated cave troll
Spending days at home
Snoozing and dreaming
Letting this booming city grow,
      Without his influence.

Sick of it, he wakes and stays woken,
Going to paint and write,
Party and love and dance and drive,
Goodbye sedation.

I miss you
Like leopards miss trees.
Like plants miss light.
Like babies miss mothers.
Like I miss you.

I'm not even poetic about it.
It's blatant;
     It didn't have to be this way.

I started to describe you to my friends
As a gravity well
A black hole
Vantablack.

You take EVERYTHING and give nothing in return,
You became an anomaly,
You were my sun,
Then one day your
Gravity became too large,
And you became that... Thing.
Taker.

The way you treat people is unacceptable,
And this is coming from a nihilist.

You are not a bad person,
You started to become one.

The sky is Velvet.
How velvet blue it flows and sings to me the darkness and screaming of the night. It's softens and dampens
The Echoes echolocating and where I am in this world.
On the other side of the sun I hide in his shadow God his shadow still finds me though.
I'm not hiding in his shade, I am bathing in it. These days have become too much to bear, and **** is his shadow nice, his velvet blue shadow. But there's more to this than that,
How high the sky, how soft the air, how hard the ground is on my bare feet as I bruise and bash them against the ground in my constant wandering.

This Velvet Sky, a soft Silk Tie,
Around my neck it holds me tonight,
Tightening this white shirt to my chest,
This Shadow holds me.

Accept the things you cannot change,
And change the things you can.
It's nights like these I wish I could,
And I wish I could hold your hand.
You're further away than the thousand miles between us,
Something we should discuss.

You've closed your ears,
You won't see me
You won't come near,
We can't have the peace I've seen.

Something changed.
Something changed.

Accept the things you cannot change,
This is Buddha speaking.
My Lord and idle
My light of day and shine at night,
My release from dusk and fright.

Buddha speaks through me and
He SHINES through me,
Like the glow of sunlight,
Powers me, encourages me
And jostles me awake.
It takes from me pain,
Gives me strength,
Helps me wake every day.

Siddhartha.

Now that I think of it,
There are things in my chest
I don't let out,
Things trapped behind iron bars
And locked coffers
Things I never want to show,

This is a prison
Trapped in my head games,
Games I play every day.
Praying that every day is a day-
With you.
Not one more day alone.
I wish you knew.

Every cigarette I breathe,
I breathe you.
Every burning breath that I take
Is one that I take with you next to me.

Desperate landscape,
Every road is further
Than the furthest I've been from before-
Ohio is worn, I'm done being torn.

My mind's made up.
Every possibility has been considered,
I know what I choose from here,
And I don't know if it's something you want to hear.

I still choose you.
I choose time and painful nights.
I choose the time apart,
All the hard parts.

Sometimes,
When I'm beginning to drift to sleep,
Sitting or laying with my blindfold on,
I smile.
It's not a weak smile.

My brain thinks of the happiest moments of my life, and some of them are with you.
Always you when I'm sleeping.

I'm worried they'll see me smile.

Moths don't know they're flying into a streetlight or campfire. They're innately tuned to follow the light, the moon. But we make diversions for them, we build fires to warm ourselves, and in turn, direct the moths from their moon to their grave.

People do this too. In the process of warming oneself, we create a light which can be witnessed. When we take care of ourselves, we shine beautifully. And others may be drawn to that light, instead of the light which would bring them true happiness, and bring out their own true beauty.

Beware false prophets. Follow the true light.