100 milligrams of flexeril
to relax my beating heart
until the muscle stops
flexing
beating
pumping.

100 milligrams of restoril
and maybe
finally
i can sleep.

maybe
i can finally sleep.

waking up has become such a chore
such an unpleasant experience
and if this doesn't stop it,
nothing will.

flexeril and restoril
and 45 milligrams
of methadone
because all i could score
was four and a half pills.

30 milligrams of phenagren
just to make sure
i can keep it all down.
i heard you could use
dramamine
but hey,
who wants to risk it?

i've taken my last chance.

15 milligrams of xanax
and if i can make it
for another hour or so
i won't even remember
what i've done.

this will end with a clean slate,
me on the floor
*******,
saying mother,
mother,
what the **** did i do?

if i can speak at all.

290 milligrams
to prove
this is not
a cry for help.

Before I knew it, He had a dead locked grip
But the monster is breathing his last dying breath

It's pitiful I had to feel it to hate it
I saw him ******* our empire
He had his grip on my family tree
While I was a fetus
It happened near the time I was born
At 20 he eased his grip on my father
And it took me so, so long to realize that it was simply so
He could tighten his grip on me
I thought my mortal soul
Could handle a Real Killer Demon
All by myself
Yeah ******* right
I have to admit, I kept him at bay for longer than most
I just rode around on his back for the first years
When she left, I didn't stop buying her share
I just did twice as ******* much
And I thought I was way past rock bottom
280 milligrams
Still not where I wanna be          
I still got a bag full, though                 [keep going man, you got this]
But i loosened my grip on him                   - th' demon whispers-
I played dead for a while
I just had to put it down
I have to admit
The scars were painful
His hand really sticks, and believe me....
The longer he's got you, the harder it sticks
You gotta grow a backbone
And a set of big *****
                            To force out of his grip
Everybody around me is just trading drugs for other drugs
Like really
There is a ******* drug
that helps you to get off drugs
That is truly *******
Did you hear what I just said?
People actually think drugs...
Are gonna help you....
Get off drugs....
Cold Turkey is tride and true
The only bona-fide method
I did it, and I promise you can too
Ten days or so is worth the rest of your life, I promise....
Good thing I kicked in-between semesters
I would have never made it through class Detoxing
And I surely wouldn't have the top spot
That means no student of the month
Only questionable job prospects...
**** that
I really am gonna be the best of the best
I just can't settle for "At-Least" Livin'
The Pharmaceutical monster lost his grip a long time ago
Oxycontin is dead
But there's one loose end
I really gotta clear the fog
Epic change is among us
It was a great ride
But I have to say goodbye to you Mrs. Mary Jane   :(
I really do love you
I do
And yes I can still be great if you come along for the ride
But I can only be the best if I leave you here for a while
Goodbye my dear
We have had much fun
We might surely cross path later
You never know what direction the world will go
We'll just have to see
I really never thought I would see this day
But I have decided
That it has to be tonight
You have it here on paper
Finally nippin' it in the bud....
I gotta let you go, too Mary
Peace

“i haven’t seen her in years,”
said the hospital bed,
“though i’ve seen many others,
who sobbed violently like her,
who sunk into me like a young, rusting anchor.
who could not get comfortable in one position or
one mindset or
one truth.
i have felt them dig in their heels
and try to ache and and fight and
scream, just quietly enough not to wake their roommate.”

“i remember their shapes,”
said the hospital bed,
“how their voices rose slowly like a far-off ambulance siren,
how their faces fell when they remembered the emergency
was right here.
i have been kicked, punched,
clung to, held on to,
as if gravity switched suddenly and they feared
yet another aspect of the universe was against them.
i’ve seen ***** sheets and i’ve seen clean ones. i’ve
seen boys with tattoos on their faces and
razor marks on their arms. i’ve seen pain.
i’ve seen girls who wouldn’t turn off the lights,
girls who couldn’t turn off the lights,
girls who had turned a light off once and never wanted
to do anything else. i’ve seen pain.

i’ve felt love before
more often than the lovers thought they loved,
more strongly than the fighters thought
they could fight.
in shaky hands folding down blankets
more carefully than they have all week
in heads that flop ungracefully onto
pillows, securely,
fulfilled.
in the slow turn of a hospital bracelet
around a pale wrist,
in large, golden brown hands,
inspected through tear-blurred eyes,
through scratched glasses,
picked up off the floor after discovering
force won’t carry a ring of thin plastic
as far as you thought.

i hear change in whispers,
good night, good luck,
in hushed acceptance, in ‘yes,
i really am here’. in
screams that send nurses in panic only to find
you were laughing. in numbers,
in ‘five hundred milligrams,’
in ‘three gained pounds’, in
‘one more day’.

i hear shock, i hear fear,
in echoes of parents’ voices,
‘why here? why now?’
i have heard and seen and felt all of them.

but she,”
continued the hospital bed,
“hasn’t been in here in a while.
i haven’t heard her whisper
to her roommate about what she did
‘that night’, i haven’t seen her
sneak away from her pile of pajamas
as if she didn’t just hide something there,
i haven’t heard her empathize
with a pencil sharpener.

it’s been so long,
it’s hard to imagine,”
said the hospital bed,
‘i hardly remember  her'.
if only the hospital bed knew
that she could hardly remember
herself from then either,
if only it knew she hadn't stopped
fighting once she left
if only it knew
how she felt when they said
she only needed to go to therapy
every other week.
it felt like progress,
and it felt like hope,
and no one better than
a hospital bed
could understand that.

Those blue pills have been given to me by those
Angels in stethoscopes.
The dying will stop, so I’m told.
Your soul will be able to hide now.
I smile at the thought of this blackness
Being ripped from my innards.
A hard night of drinking will
Do well enough, now.
I ***** out my soul.

Every few months I am your play thing, my angel,
My savior in your white coat.
Milligrams increase as I stare up at the hazel
Sky. I ***** out my soul once more.

I am your baby, now. I rely on you not for life,
But rather, not to die.
Cradle me, kiss me on the forehead,
Say it will all be alright.

Die, sweetie, die!
Die, your *******!
You venom, seeping through my veins,
Die and come back to life and Die.
This blackness; I need you.

My angel, with his shiny new armor,
Loves me with no remorse.
He’s told me as so.
Let’s put more heaven into you,
He says.

This is love.

' 1. I read the online account of a man who, after fifteen years of hitting gascid – nitrous oxide and acid in tandem – developed a B-vitamin deficiency. This may sound rather benign, but it made him begin to lose feeling in his fingertips. The numbness spread up his arms to his core, and he was soon paralyzed. After what he summarized as the better part of a year of ‘psychological horror,’ he emerged from the episode fully functional again, but with one caveat; he had fried his neurons so badly that every single incoming sensation from each nerve in his body was received by his brain as agonizing pain. He has spent the last fourteen years enduring this. He has tried to commit suicide several times, simply to end his constant physical suffering. He is still here today. His will is stronger than I can imagine; I was afraid while reading his story.

2. The guy who said ‘all women want in a man is confidence’ wasn’t ugly or poor.

3. Once, I chugged enough coffee and energy drinks on a long-empty stomach to experience a moderate overdose, to the tune of something between five hundred and seven hundred milligrams of caffeine. This may sound rather benign, but as I laid on the floor of my high school’s bathroom, convulsing, I had, up ‘til that point, never lived through a more unappealing chemical episode. The nausea was all-consuming. At two thousand milligrams, I would die outright. At the level I had ingested, my heart beat three times every second for five and a half hours. During the peak hours, I could have sworn I hit a steady two hundred-plus beats-per-minute. I hammered out a several-page text to my father with the same haste, cataloging my plight. My heart probably aged fourteen years, enduring that.

4. There was a time in my life when I stopped looking into mirrors. It took me seven years to develop a coping mechanism. Ten years after that, I found myself spending minutes with eyes locked in the mirror, examining that foreign face. Some call it confidence. That behavior scares me more than anything else in my life.

5. I stopped looking at your familiar face a couple years ago. I was afraid of your gaze begetting your touch, and those lightning bolts of pain shooting from each of your fingertips, through the front of my torso into my spine. I am afraid to tell you that you’re hardly on my mind as much as myself these days. I am not confident that I could tell you this, were I given the chance. My heart is facing its midlife crisis now, and I am still figuring out how to treat you like an adult would.

when someone thanks me for writing the things they wish they could say out loud I apologize for hours until they stop wishing and ask me why. I usually tell them the same thing
"do you know when you're driving alone and that one song comes on, you know that one. that one song with a million different memories dripping off the tongue of that one man who sings like he never got on that airplane and so he didn't not make it back to the ground? and you're thinking about crashing and when you're thinking about crashing you almost do crash, because you were distracted about crashing and you get scared and realize that you just want to not want to crash? well that's how I feel all the time. Even when I'm completely still. Or when you're in the bath and you see faces in the ceiling and you wonder if the faces you're seeing are significant? like maybe you're seeing their face because they never meant to hurt you or maybe you took an extra 20 milligrams today and you're just a little out of sorts."
I'm not done explaining why I'm sorry, but this is usually around the time they interrupt, all "no, I apologize" all "I shouldn't have asked"

How many milligrams a day must you take to fill the emptiness your body is so used too.

depression feels like a fire,
burning your insides endlessly.
Bones wither away,
embers barely lit light the skin
that once knew it stood for more
than just skin.

Anxiety eats at you,
unknowingly your body has become cannibalistic.
There is a war raging inside your mind,
destroying the ability to decipher
what’s pain and what’s not.

here’s a bottle with 35 pills
I hope it helps.

" Don’t over-doze "

rivers of salt; saccharine silicon and
iridescent nightmares;
kids carve their names into trees
because their concept of forever is
three summers forward;
entropy demands a tithe, a
forfeiture of lives; decimate your herds
and still
no, it is not enough.
know it is not enough.

don't keep your sweet little mouth
open too long; sugar attracts flies,
and pretty soon your
teeth will be teeming
with maggots and rot,
streptococcus sanguis
cheerfully wearing down your enamel
like you wore down my inhibitions.
"it'll be fun," you said, dropping
one hundred milligrams
on your tongue, firmly grasping the back
of my neck, and applying your lips to mine.
one hundred milligrams
slide down my throat, and despite myself,
I laugh, because even when I'm scared
I want to be with you.

the Black Angel is God On Earth; she is
lonely beyond belief, and I give her a hug.
people forget that monsters have
feelings too, and
God?
God is the biggest monster of them all.

God is entropy, and she is
unimpressed by the pyramids
on your dollar bills; she will devour
the stars and the planets and newborn
babies swaddled in blankets,
and she yet hungers:
redwoods and sequoias and aloe vera,
microchips and inkjets and MacBooks.

we are crowded around the bonfire,
s'mores and cheap liquor, your hand on
my thigh; the heavens have
opened up, drenching us
in starlight: I have never felt more
beautiful. you raise my wrist to your
mouth, placing a gentle kiss on my
scaphoid and my lunate; you swipe
your tongue across supple flesh
before clamping down with your teeth;
I am seeing stars and feeling lovely
and I am so, so enamored with you and
so, so happy you are here.

The silent assassins came floating down,
Tiny but deadly they came.
Two thousand dead mice,
Stuffed full of Tylenol,
On the island of Guam they deplaned.

To **** off the snakes
That are killing Guam’s birds
Tylenol should do the trick
A mere 80 milligrams
Can **** a grown snake
Or at least make them terribly sick.


I hope this works better
Than the Mongoose Brigade
We deployed on Hawaii’s fair shores.
They were sent to **** rats
But instead took long naps
And the birds are more rare than before.

Hello, anguish.

Long time, no torture.

How have your travels been?

Tell me, did the fires burn
Too hot for you?
I thought, for once,
I had banished you
To whichever pit
Of Hell
You managed to arise from,
So that you may
Find me so easily,
As the goal of a hunt
Caught in your crosshairs.

I should have known better.

Well, while you're here,
Please have a seat.
Sit anywhere you like.

Anywhere but THERE!

You must be a well-seasoned guest
To know exactly which door to knock on,
And exactly where you want to rest.
So of course you pick my heart,
And lay your feet upon my soul.

I do so hope you're comfortable.

Insistent *******.

How have I been?

Why, how kind of you to ask.

What's your motive?

I've been fine, really.
A little sporadic uneasiness
Here and there,
But mostly on the fast track
To regaining my peace of mind.

Well, I was actually
In the middle of it
When you arrived.

I sound like I'm talking to a therapist.

Yes, I need 10 milligrams of Stop Talking To Inanimate Feelings.

Oh, don't be sorry.

As if you ever are.

I don't mind the company at all.
I do spend so much time
Alone these days.

I was well on my way
To finding my resting place,
My place of solitude
And productive thought,
A fragile teacup
Of a space
In the landfill
Of the world.

Some days are better
Than others.

What's that?

A gift, you say?

A souveneir, perhaps?

To hell if I'm keeping whatever it is.

What might you have for me this time.

Some sort of anxiety, I'm sure. But what about this time around?

My schooling? My finances? My family? My relationship, matters of the heart?


Oh.

Uncertainty.

Well... it wasn't
what I was expecting,
But still, it's nothing less
Than what I would expect from you.

Uncertainty about what,
Though?

There's no label this time.

.........

What do you mean,
It's a gift for identifying?

And WHERE are you going?

No.

NO.

You cannot simply leave this here,
Resting upon my weary shoulders,
Which bear so much already,
And leave me to figure it out.
You mustn't simply waltz off
Into the unknown blackness
Of the recesses of the human mind,
As if you haven't a care in the world.

You are a terrible guest,
Showing up uninvited,
At a most inconvenient time,
Bearing gifts of unneeded,
Unnamed weight,
Leaving me to figure it out.

Fine. Leave.

You wretched, vile creature.

See if I let you in again.
Begone, and let every door
Hit you on your way out.
May every jagged rock
In your path
Catch your foot in your
Sadistic, carefree walk
About the earth.
May every web
That spiders weave
Entangle you
Beyond rescue.

Yes, goodbye.

Now, what of this....
Thing?

It has no name,
Yet I am supposed
To know what it is.

Hmm.

Feels like...
Questioning.

Yes, there's questioning here.

Many questions.

But of what?

I have questions about
Many things,
As my curious nature
Must have it so.

Also feels like...
Emotion.

Unwanted emotion.

How that little beast
Does manage to bring
The worst gifts to me,
At the worst times,
Is beyond me.

He needs a hobby.

Let's see... emotions
Of the heartfelt kind.
Of the deep recesses
Of that bipolar *****
Which no ne trusts
And everyone breaks.

Emotions and questions.

Oh dear God.

No.

No, I must dispose of it
Right away.

This is the sort of thing
I fear most.
HOW did he manage,
Also,
To get fear in there,
As well?!

No, it must be thrown away.


"Do not yell your curses at me!"

"Who are you to say that I
Haven't an idea at all
What I want, and when,
And where, and why?!
What judge are you,
And with what authority
Do you claim I am divided,
My side unpicked,
And that a canyon
Lives within me?"

"Petty fool, you are not welcome here!"
I know what I am doing!
And I shall make the rules,
For it is I who must obey them!"


Alas,
There are no rules.
None to be made,
And none to be followed.

Even more tragic,
Is that I know not
What I am doing,
And I doubt I ever will.

For it is these,
Of all horrid gifts,
Delivered without
Notice,
At the precious price
Of losing sureness of mind
And peace of the soul,
That may not be returned.

The gift that keeps on giving,
Until I decide it shan't...

A decision I cannot bear to make,
While in company
Of battered spirit,
Fearful heart,
And overconfident,
Incessantly calculating mind. 

For now that he is gone,
I must entertain them, too.  

*How did I ever get so lucky?

Ten milligrams of adderall, bought from the girl across the hall.
Speaking in a British accent because I'm lovely at lying,
and even better at believing it myself.
I'm from London, Liverpool,
I'm from the deepness of the cut on your leg
from those flowers that looked harmless but they
scratched
at his truck, destroyed my luck while I was high
and you were too.
The tent is my place to be with you
with my thoughts being misconstrued.
I spoke with your name coming out of my mouth
staring at the ceiling and I didn't stop
giving up.
Stepping off a curb at the wrong velocity
can hurt your ears the way we
hurt me.

It was six in the morning**: I sat in a cab dangling on small-talk with a middle-aged white male cabbie basted in the demeanor of the over-friendly uncle. He asked me about school—I'm hyperawake, paranoid, body pulsing, feeling loose, depersonalized, and lightly psychedelic—my vision wavering as if someone had entered my skull to punch raw brain. I did a gram and a half of ******* that night; mixed lines with ketamine to simulate a proto-psychosis, but am convinced I may very well have driven myself past the point of no return. I'd been doing this strict mix for over 2 straight weeks, landing myself in out-of-body experiences and coked-out drawls on the floor like a sad, puckered monkey chewing on a lemon it mistook for an orange. Why I led myself to this existential precipice is both beyond me and totally within my rational sympathies if I pretend I am on the outside looking in.
When I was 18—drawn, for the first time—away from smalltown Powell River and into the Vancouver suburbia of Port Coquitlam, my only successful job-find was a McDonald's arched inside a Wal-Mart. The double-insult this presented me as a teenage anarchist pushed me deep into my first true emotional crisis which I only turned to accept after a particular phone call with my father in which he appealed to me to think of this stint as a 'temporary social experiment'; a chance to learn and breathe this proletarian experience from the inside out. During the pre-Christmas night-shifts, the only customers we ever had were the dark, apathetic silhouette-people Wal-Mart hired to greet the absolutely no one's walking through the door. I incessantly cleaned what was already a mirror-wet floor and made sad conversation with Rosario—the slightly autistic shift-manager with a prickly-shave of a face and an awkward sense of humor I could never come to appreciate and yet always managed to humor in polite obsequiousness. Regardless, it was a form of spread and endless boredom that began to fascinate me; it brought me to a darkness I had never quite known. It was an experience—like all experiences—to be had at least once, to the fullest and truest intensity. To be pushed with reckless sincerity.
Ever since, I have found myself pushing every limit to disembodied extremes—on occasion, to points of such profound irresponsibility or feigned responsibility that I break a particular streak and wind-up on the other dichotomous side of whatever line I unintentionally (or intentionally?) crossed (or broke?) because everything is a social experiment and I've touched the multifarious lives of overworked modernity, residential care aide, dishwasher, Christopher McCandlessesque wilderness jaunt, melancholic Kierkegaard, psychonaut, and now: a short-lived ****** inspired by the excess of Burroughs and the early beatniks all willing to **** their darlings for the sake of blood-stained posterity.
And yet meanwhile—in the cab—I can feel my headache grow perceptively wider from my left temple. Almost like a mushroom cloud over Bikini Atoll I am watching from as safe a distance as the physical body can withstand, according to some calculable hypothesis drafted by Oppenheimer himself. I am constantly amazed at how lucid I am in conversation with this friendly cabby; given that I feel as if I'm about to go ******, focusing so deftly on the way the streetlights glide across placid puddles moving only with our tires intervention—and the way I keep imagining insanity in the form of a zombie-likeness of myself strapped into an electric chair, skin melting and eyes rolling back in my head as I seizure to metaphysical death—I still laugh away short quips about the blind-leading-the-blind (he has no idea how to find my destination, and keeps pulling over to check a book road-map for 4143 Hessington Place). The only reason I am with him now is that I am venturing to see my girlfriend at her group-house past Uvic where the door is always unlocked for friends and friends-of-friends, she being the only solution to this crisis with her stash of .5 Xanax pills.
I remember those tense moments—with my body and brain as taut as a bow—he would pull over or pull out and my entire existence seemed to move through space and time as if against a wind that was perpetually in resistance—as if my entire consciousness was going to capsize into some form of overdosed darkness. Even when I exited the cab and waved a friendly goodbye to the old man, I could feel my dopamine receptors attempting to fire on empty. This caused a latent buzz that was only solved with two milligrams of alprazolam and my eyes wide shut until my head shut down.

I held her close. I knew she thought I was an idiot.

today it is sunday, and i want to be waking up with you.
look - this isn't going to be a cheesy poem about love, or maybe it is.
the summer of 2013.
i was only 15, i had no idea what love was.
you said it was never unrequited love, but what i perceived was just as bad. you loved the idea of a deadbeat me who would care only when you cared, and who wouldn’t mind being put on the bench when her team was losing. instead, i just scratched out my eyes and went to the mound anyways. somehow i never struck out.
some days i am an overly caffeinated and hyperventilated excuse for post traumatic stress induced dramatizations.
i wrote a trip report on you. the come up is foggy after repeated use. the peak is incredible as always. i am so ******* addicted that sometimes i forget everyone can see the track marks on my forearms.
if i were to speak for myself, i'd tell you that the universe is twice as big as we think it is and you're the only one who made that idea less devastating.
all the boys that had "loved me" before then, loved me with sweaty palms and left me with sad bruises. all the girls that "loved me" before then, loved me with busy mouths and shallow "i love you's". all the boys and girls i thought i might have "loved" were all just something leading me to you, and i think me still falling in love with you two years after we broke up really proves my point. loving you was different. it was hard. it was tiring. it happened fast. it happened so nicely. *it was. so. *******. worth. it. you're so worth it. you have not been treated the way you should be treated, and i promise to make up for every time you were left upset all night crying because of the ****** person who made you feel that way.
this is so scattered.
it's like i wrote you into ******* existence. i never thought i would get the girl i've been dreaming up. you're everything i've ever written about all bundle up into one perfectly imperfect (beautifully) flawed person. and you're all mine.
look - i used to write you into a sad poem at two in the morning, and my bones trembled like your upper lip as you cried in your bathroom that night two summers ago. i think i’m still shaken because my skin is fitting a little strangely
i feel gravity in my kneecaps
i feel ice rubbing down my spine
i feel false hope and real hope,
and i feel the ten milligrams of relaxation that i took to forget what i could. the mass in my lungs is shrinking, the fear in my empty stomach is being replaced with love and it's all for you you you you y o u.
there was something in my bones that told me to love you. i remember promising to like you even after i knew everything about you, and it turns out i loved you instead.
i'll cut my soul into a million pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home.
i'll write love poems to the parts of yourself you can't stand.
i'll stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you i'm not afraid of your dark. you're so beautiful because you let yourself feel so many things, and that's pretty **** brave.
i am in love with you simply and as difficult as it is to remember all 10 trillion digits in pi. i want all of you, i am in love with all of you. i want you forever, i want to be in love with you forever.
i love you.

five milligrams of xanax
straight to the neck

two packs of those awful light cigarettes, a gram of baby powder quality *******, trojans, two syringes

I jump out of bed to the sound of my father's wake-up call. I was just playing a very important game in one of my stupid, meaningless dreams. My head spins downward in a still drug induced motion. Lora had been with me last night, which had helped me sleep. I run downstairs as Downers always tend to sustain my energy. My lunch is packed and I belch up some of my Gatorade I had already drank. I can feel a reassuring burn in my throat that tells me "Today is another day." Father asks about when I'm getting my tonsils removed and I tell him, and he says "It's good you know. Just get it over with." Yeah, that's what I'm doing; getting the **** over with and done, I get it." I come into work and I see orange foamy **** on the ground that smells like *****. What a **** job I got myself into. And the kid that works with me is a ******* four eyed *****. He stares blankly at me, never hearing what I say. "Looks like antiseptic." He responds, "What?" I walk away and get to work and think about the Fiorinal I am going eat. I go to the bathroom and take two with my Gatorade and then wash back another two. I take Franky out to the field, and he's chortling and having a real fit. I tell him to shut the **** up. I also let him know how much of a **** he is. My head feels loose and my body feels light. But it's still a mundane kind of high which is ****** to cope with such a mundane, life-******* job. So I take three more. Franky starts spinning in circles like a two ton child waiting in line for pizza day at school. Franky's nihilistic values and unruly behaviour has been a total ******* hassle to me. I've heard he's bucked and killed three people so far. So I feed him some of my Fiorinal; about 300 milligrams. I kick the ****** in his paddock and he runs off to harass the others. My head is throbbing nicely and my center is igniting with a sunlight feeling. I see Franky out there gradually falling under the spell. He then keels over; lopsided like a fat bag of flour breathing heavily with a dry cough. I give him a peanut butter sandwich as a method to resuscitate. He cranes his neck from his idle position and eats the sandwich. It turns out there was another 300 milligrams concealed within the sandwich. I walk away as I eat four more pills. I'm good but not good enough. The kid that I’m working with is still sweeping the hallway. The mundane procedure erases his reality into some meaningless nightmare. He then looks up to me and asks "What's wrong with Franky?" I tell him to shut the **** up and get back to work; "And work better while you're at it." I knew about the pills in the sandwich cause I put them in there for Franky. What I didn't know was that Franky was allergic to peanut. I see him out there, spread eagle with his belly touching the ground. I go “****!” and eat another dozen-something pills in response to the distress. The kid asks what I’m eating and I barely hear him and then I think about burning down his stupid church so there is no excuse for him to miss every other Sunday’s work when I got better **** to do. Then I think about the pain in my stomach and the blood I taste from somewhere. And as I’m running to help Franky, I think that he will be fine; he’s lying on his stomach. Usually when they are dead they are lying on their backs. When I come up close to him, his large red eyes see only death. I feel something raw and smooshy in my underpants. I must have soiled myself unknowingly. He’s still breathing, that’s good. My body and mind do not feel intact and everywhere I try to open up my closed eyes, the peephole becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. I smell like ****. Was it the pills? Was it the store-bought stuffed peppers I ate last night while playing solitaire? I think of its oily texture and merciless burn which only causes more stomachache and diarrhea. I’m now lying next to Franky. His struggle to live is sad and pathetic. I close my eyes thinking: respiratory depression. I start to cry. I hear the ambulance. I open up and I see Franky’s eyes frozen directly at me; as if he knew I killed him. He is stiff, heartless and somewhat waxy. He looks like he should be on display in the Kremlin. What separates between us now is the coagulate sandwich that smells like stomach juices. I don’t know if it’s mine or Franky’s. “Are you alright?” someone asks. I can’t respond; there is no energy. I’m sure it’s the paramedic. Now Franky’s owner races through and steps over me and onto the coagulate sandwich which goes Sshjerp! Tears stream down her puffy ***** face and starts consoling to the dead animal in a very sick, twisted kinda way. She goes back and forth from talking to him and then yelling at me. “You did this! It’s all your fault! You can go rot!” I’m half conscious and I have an oxygen mask strapped over my mouth and I’m humming one of my favourite songs, thinking about how delightful it is to be alive whilst the ***** still points her gross, fat fingers in my face. “Say goodbye to your twenty thousand dollars, sweetheart.” The twenty thousand ******* dollars you had spent every ounce of energy to maintain and keep alive.

What's in his mind?
One cup of labor
Two scoops of pain
Three scoops of lust
Issues with trust
Four cups of distress
One more for the rest
And five milligrams
of pessimism at best

What's in his heart?
One tablespoon of pride
Two teaspoons of shame
A spoonful of ambition
One third expedition
Two-thirds of abolition
A half a cup of absentee
Another half depravity

What's in his soul?
A recipe I have yet to know

Add Abilify to your Pristiq
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll add 150 milligrams of Welbutrin
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll double that
but if Abiliify puts fat on you
like some of the corticosteroids
we’ll replace it with Saphris
and hope that doesn’t upset your stomach
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll cut out caffeine and nicotine
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll cut out high fructose corn syrup
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll stop sodas and candy
and if you don’t feel better
in a few days
we’ll do an fMRI of your brain
and by then you will be so tired
of chasing happiness
that you will just sit down on the couch
and play with your cat
who knows better than you

Things have never been easy,
and I have never been one to talk about that.
But I can flip the switch,
a few sparks and a puff of smoke,
and shut down everything
from the inside out.
I can refuse to feel.
And it’s easier that way.

Things have never been painless,
and I have always liked it that way.
(Or so I thought.)
I have four scars to show,
all that’s left from four years
of cutting
and burning
forcing adrenaline to replace
whatever shutdown couldn’t delete.
And it’s less painful that way.

But I am painfully sorry.

Please believe me when I say that I never meant to hurt anyone.
You, especially.
You were the only thing I would miss.
I can’t believe I almost gave you up.
I am selfish. I am cynical.
I am hateful. I am unpleasant.
I am busted, broken, bleeding,
bold and brazen and burned and belligerent
medicated and molded and morphed
and Christ, does anyone know ******* how hard it is
to keep going
to pick up where you left off
when you told yourself
told everyone,
that you were quitting?
When you'd finally dug a hole deep enough to bury yourself in
and they tell you you have to dust yourself off
and climb out
and keep marching?
Does anyone see how ******* difficult it is to smile at them
when you had already accepted the fact
that you’d never see them again?
I chose it for myself
for a ******* reason. And now I’m back
and they think something’s changed?
The solution to my problems
is not as simple as 100 milligrams
of a white pill called happiness.
Maybe this is a chemical imbalance,
maybe my mind is dysfunctional,
or maybe it was meant to be.
But nobody let me choose.

I am sorry. I’m being selfish again.

If you still want me,
after everything I’ve done
to my parents
to my friends
to myself
to you
Whatever is left of me
is yours.
If you still want me.

Some people remind you
of hurricanes
    cold surfaces swirling,
crushing
      the glare you get from an overhead
light
        off bathroom walls.

Drinking Duchamp Whiskey
                 0 grams of protein
             250 milligrams of sodium
               34 grams of sugar

The grouts of your favorite poetry book
                  bound in a trapper keeper
know
            how you will be forgotten.

It's first words
are "The day thee art"
and you fill in:

-'someone who won't freak out
              about what I do.'

-'the oils from your nose
     smeared across those
        bacterial tiles.'

But remember what the poet meant:

                 The Stagnant Bourgeois
e     v     a     p     o     r     a     t     i     n     g
  out of existence because
Darwinism
      has a germ any scope can see--Greed.

            Some people
the fittest and weakest
are in one big ***--getting crushed
    no matter what

Her happiness was measured in milligrams-
the dosage of her Prozac,
or the amount of alcohol she didn't drink
alone in her room
and the number of men who lay on her bed
for twenty minutes-
thirty, on a good day.

The lengths we will go to feel alive
when what we really want is death.

okay so i hate you but i only hate part of you. and i think you could understand that- i really really do, you know, deep down. milligrams. they come in fragments. like tiny fountain penny wishes, like uneven television screens and starless night skies. (that i always though you would see one day.) but not you. YOU'RE not even apart of me not now. i won't see you. you'll be walking. you'll look like someone else from very far away. someone i read about in a book. and you won't see me either. (you know this is a lie.) you know i lie all the time. to myself, to you, to the world, to my words & to my mouth. how could i exist in a world of truth and reality? after all, after all i've done. for you. for you i would climb the highest mountain. for you i would swim the deepest sea & brave the darkest night & tame the brighest fire. you know that you aren't even real to me anymore

because i used to think you were something else. a world of beauty, right before my eyes. hair the color of ****. eyes with untold stories just screaming to be revealed. (and would i? no no never.) silent. enjoy it. because never again will you feel something like this, never again will you feel the energy that i gave to you. longed to show you. tried to make yours. and all i wanted was you. i was all wrong, you weren't right at all, but there was something. i longed to feel your touch; a touch i envisioned many nights, staring into a broken mirror, wishing for anyone else but myself to be there. longed for a feeling that no one but you could ever give me. not in a million thousand billion years. because you were real. and i knew that.

"i don't believe in monsters." you could have just shot me instead. your ******* revolver. put it to. my ******* temple. longed for you to make me bleed. drag the secrets of the world out of me, dim and ***** with trash and grime and grit, PULL IT from the depths of my veins and repent all that i once said. breathe FIRE into my frozen blue blood that runs like the deepest stream in the loudest forest. i'll surely die instead of live, yet i've always been most afraid of both. you must taste like sugar. i saw it all along. and you. i would wrap you in flower petals, save you for no one but myself. give you the love that you've been starving for for so long, my beautiful angel. your endless paradox train never crossed my tracks before that dy. (you knew that it was true.) was true all along. armless demon, you strangle me. choking choking choking on nothing but words & pills & fragments & drugs & *** & hate & violence & I KNEW THAT YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND. BUT god if only you could. if you could see through my eyes, understand why i do this to myself. maybe i wouldn't be so crazy. i know i ask too much. i know i want too much and i know i feel to much. but you don't understand- i want you to. (milligrams. fragments. we snort them side by side.) to tell you my story. to take you inside of me and know why i am what i am and who i am. (I AM NOT A MONSTER.) i want to make you understand why i crave the blood and why i crave the love and why all i really want

is you.

the enfeebling mistake
veiled as a no-no
the little miss brazen **** bears the brunt
of what now must be a joke
incoherently fishing about for the juice
indecent glycemic index
meter says 30
profile says 10
or 15
milligrams of the judy blue pastille
no gobs to say about she
but when her jeans genuflect
no tiff
no tease
be a lamb or another even-toed ungulate
and give the poor girl what she needs

Fly you fool
People only get older
And poetry doesn't always need to rhyme
Life hands you lemons
But my tequila requires limes

What's the recipe for ice?
Can't see with 20/20 vision eyes
Fighting for a far off cause
And Santa Clause

Whatchamacallits
And compost heaps
Michigan to Denver
Face down in the mud
The baker helps me up
He's up at 2 AM
To hand out yesterdays left overs to the hobos and bums

Elliot Ness and Pat Garrett are on the trail
But The Iceman is watching patiently in his quiet suburb to emerge and bathe himself in their agony and his compensation

Hush puppies and truffle fries
Go-carts zooming through the race riots

Stomp
Tap
Snap
Clap
And sing along around the wishing well
Across the universe
Along the watchtower
With the brooding troubadour

The truth is ugly
Unless it sugarcoats itself with a false foundation and misleading mascara  

The burning bush spits out orders like ticker tape

I reckon its witchcraft
Either that
Or vertigo and dream piercing alarm clocks
Snooze

I AM VICE PRESIDENT AGNEW
Take it all away

The air is polluted with "love"
Or self-satisfaction disguised as love

More often than not
Almost always
I want you
Just you

I use geometry to calculate all these feelings
In summation, I'm insane but not as insane as you for loving me

Fractured my scaphoid
Now I'm paranoid of curbs and confrontation

I board the drunken ship
And circle Pangaea

We don't need a meteorologist to tell us the wind is with us, on our side
As we float on to the next one

My optometrist from Minnesota calls me and tells me my state of the art x-ray specs are in

I pulled something in my back, slipped a disk

Gentlemen, I take my leave  

I've been the liar
The actor
The martyr
The scribe
The one under the microscope hating every second
The one on the wanted poster

I can take your boos
I can guzzle your *****
Then clog your toilet
And walk away clean

Satan checks my blood pressure
Gives me ten milligrams of ****** and unleashes me upon the world

I burn the corks and crack the plates
I litter the empty bottles to leave them for the rest of you to recycle

Can you handle change?
Can you hold your own during the transformation?
This erratic evolution of the soul and person?

You've been in the honor society
Have you been inmate 107501?
Then what do you know?

You've been converted by the prizes in cereal boxes
Save the box tops and mail them in for an all expense paid trip to Crimea

Take this box cutter and do your worst

Your tongue licks away this candy shell of doubt that surrounds me
Until you reach the chewy center and free the surreal pleasure of sweetness

Her body is endless , stars sinking seas
Two blurring lines, too many drinks
When the risk comes in milligrams
The night , at some point seems
endless
My head spinning,
Behind the face I
would never show my friends
Could this really work ,
Will it change anything

It started out such a great day
And Oh how it ends
Wait God
Wait

Wake
Wake up

Wait God
Wait

I’m ****** in the head.
It’s like cancer.
Not cancer of the brain but cancer of the mind.
It sits dormant, eating away everything in sight like a teenager that just got too high.
My chemotherapy doesn’t pump in my veins, it’s choked down my throat, like a shot that’s far too bitter to ever be chased.
Wellbutrin, Xanax, Lamictal, Z-O-L-O-F-T
To hell with the bar, it seems my only cocktail is right here because these ******* doctors tell me that
If I loosen up more than these milligrams untie me,
I might die but what’s the difference between this shot of whiskey and the game of
Russian roulette I play without this bottle of pills?
There are only so many months of grinding teeth and tense jaws and sore necks
And skin that feels like a wildfire that one person can take before the cocktails stop coming
And you’re trying to figure it out yourself between figuring out how to get the blood out of your sheets.
There’s only so much restlessness and trembling hands one woman can take before
The skill of swallowing a punch bowl of pills turns into the skill of performing a plastic
Surgery on that innocent disposable razor.
But then winter rolls by and you realize it’s too hot for those pants and sleeves to hide you.
And even when you stop there’s always questions and eyes that silently judge you.
Brain cancer is easy. Brain cancer garners everyone’s sympathy. Brain cancer is understood.
But mind cancer is a ******* enigma and those scars on your arms, your legs are harder to explain
Than the nausea and vomiting from the cytotoxic car bomb that went straight to your veins
Just like that trusty silver blade did.
The twisted truth is that you’re just as ashamed of those white lines as they are.
And then you learn to say “I’m done with the shame” and realize that
We’re all ****** in the head in our own way.

it's quiet hard to find a welcoming book, i can cite two read in one sitting, thus spoke Zarathusrta (the original intent) and the soft machine by burroughs... all others came with many composed sittings... but none of the repeated encounters can be spoken of so favourably as Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy, with that book came the kindest summer - in that i find historians the prefects of philosophy, the Republic guardians, leave the poets to do their sing-along, and furthered abstracts of symbols (should they wish, and ought), give presence to historians like Russell and Tatarkiewicz (surname derived as descended from Tartar auxiliary at the battle of Tannenberg with two naked swords dipped into ****** soil awaiting blood by a Lithuanian king married to a Polish gal).

sometimes poems can be more memorable than entire
books, there memorableness technique used in
epics gets lost most of the time,
writers' custard narrative awaiting a memorable
spontaneity is always missing, a memorable quote
needs to be bookmarked, it's hardly remembered,
all that talk of etiquette, esp. 19th century is always
the fog in novel, Mr. Darcy and his twin
Mr. Rochester, both haunted -
the former by social structures (prejudice;
his wife to be by lower caste governed by pride)
while the latter by a madwoman in the attic -
there's nothing memorable about these novels
in mono assertions, unless you have a book-club or
a cinematic script and a movie... poems are more
memorable, naturally, even if you're unable to recite
them because you rather recite the list of ingredients
for a bonkers curry, someone else will recite you a
poem, no problem. i guess that's because memorising
poetry is afforded by rhymes, the crude musicology
if given an instrument, would be to pluck
two same notes, ugly with a guitar, beautiful with
the tongue.
no, novels are not memorable, ask blind Samson about
the pillars he absorbed with his strength and pulled
down... ask him...
or... or i can tell you a little secret, it's a secret concerning
Sylvia Plath's *bell jar... page 119 in my edition (Faber & Faber),
slight digression: a page later she's complaining in
a "fictive" personality about the ineffectiveness of sleeping
pills... she has been apparently given max'      imum
strength pills... dear Sylvia,
                                        against your doctor's orders,
          against all pharmaceutical orthodoxy,
sleeping pills are best effective with alcohol,
even though the tagline is to avoid mixing the two...
i can't specify the quantity of alcohol in milligrams
akin to the dosage of the pills, dear Sylvia, they're only
effective with the liquid sedative, and perhaps a painkiller
like paracetamol...
nonetheless on page 119 she's citing a book you will
probably not read, and neither did she (explanation
a bit later)... she cites the first page of J. Joyce's
Finnegans Wake...
                 riverrun past Eve and Adam's...
and that ONE-HUNDRED LETTERED word:

  ba'ba'ba'dal'gharagh'takamminanarronk'onn'bronntonner'r­onn'tuonn'thunn'trovarr'houna'wnska'wntooh'oohoo'rdenen'thurnuk!­

i tried the syllable scalpel to my best ability for breath,
this grand anti-onomatopoeia, cut for brief pause...
but she didn't read any further like Delmore Schwartz
trying to sell this **** Grææ tongue...
she didn't read on, because there's another century in this
book:

(i left a bookmark on the page (no. 23) - a painting by
Diego Velázquez, the toilet of Venus 122.5 by 177 centimetres)

with loss of breath and entry of the centipede as follows

perkodhuskurunbarggruauyagokgorlayorgromgremmitghundhur­thrumathunnaradidillifaititillibumullunukkunun!

but i must i don't have the ratio, since i didn't bother counting
either words, but Sylvia did, and if she counted the first word
as a century, this second word must also be a century -
yet on suspicion should i believe she read further, or didn't?
they claimed the book to be a Babylonian Tower
readying for dispersions of the people, yet with historical
events it's a joke, given that there are no diacritical marks
in the book to provide stresses of accents:
e.g. fumatul poate să ucidă (romanian for: do not smoke
cigarettes, yes, there's a black market for cigarettes,
THANK GOD!) - and with saying that, it is not a book
with a Babylonian Tower attached to it, it's a tower for sure,
but a Globalisation Tower, how english became the
Lingua Levant once more, when the Franks had their
puppet king of Jerusalem at the time of Saladin.

Liz,
    I saw you on Christmas
    at church in a black dress and pearls
    we made light conversation
    as we fill filed out with the postlude
    
    31 days later, an ambulance picked you up from your friends house
    there were no lights, there were no sirens
    the obituary told me it was an accidental ****** overdose
    you were 21
    I wish i had seen the bruises on your arm that christmas
    before I walked into the snowy night

Liz,
      your funeral was held at the same church where I saw you last
      where we spent all these years
      as the postlude drew to a close
      we studied the back of wooden pews
      we asked ourself the  same question
      "Would I have been able to help?"
      we beg the walls for answers
      but they offer no reply

Liz,
     If I saw the bruises, would I have known?
     If I had known, would I have the courage to say anything?
     What would I have said?
  
    I could've given you a scared-straight talk
    with warnings and statistic
    shown you before and after pictures
    ripped from a health textbook
    but spitting facts into the face of an addict
    is like lecturing someone of the dangers of riptides
    when they're six miles from shore
    rambling about 3rd degree burns
    to someone trapped in a burning house
    but how do I keep forgiving from becoming ignoring?
    how do I stop helping from bordering on ratting out?
    I want to to get help but I don't want you to resent me
                God, what I would give
                for you to hate me right now

Liz,
      my mother discussed your passing
      with friends with red wine lips
            "Oh, Liz? Yeah- my son said she was a ****** kid"
      a ****** kid, not the pastor's daughter
     or the mission trip veteran,
     not the day care teacher, or the prankster,
     not the angel in the 2006 Christmas play
    
     Where is the line between good and bad?
     how many track marks does it take to turn a girl into a statistic?
     how far in must one drive the needle to be reduced
     to the trope of a ****** kid
     how many melted milligrams does it take to wash away the good qualities
     and leave behind a skeleton of a girl we once knew

Liz,
     they say you're gone, you're in a better place
     but God i know you're still here
     I see you in the flowers, skirting the steps of the church
     I hear you between the harmonies
     of all the hymns
     I can feel your presence
     breathing out from the cracks in the stone walls
     I see you in coffee shops
     and in restaurants and on the streets
     mocking me to do a double take
     before I remember
     and you know we have forgiven you
     as we have wailed it at the stained glass
     I really hope you have learned to forgive us

Liz,
     I saw you christmas eve
     black dress and pearls
     you died 31 laters
     you were 21
     I wish I had seen the bruises on your arm
    I wish I could've helped

I

*******, the blues
were running, the scrum
of seagulls a white cloud
of chaos above the waves.
The water churned and chopped,
teeming with small fish
devoured by bigger fish
ravished by the sharp-toothed bluefish—
all of them darting frenzied toward shore.

And my father screaming
for someone to, quick,
grab the fishing poles
for God’s sake.

My little sister
in her yellow
bathing suit
would not wait
for the poles.
She yanked fish after fish
from the boiling surf
with her small hands,
screaming in delight and victory.
She ran up and down
the beach, between
colorful umbrellas,
pausing only to toss
another writhing body
onto hot sand:
a wild child flinging
silver-scaled sacrifices
to stoic, multicolored gods.

We ate smoked bluefish for weeks.

II

Remember sitting in our first apartment
watching the snow beyond the windows,
listening to records and drinking seven-dollar
bottles of Malbec from juice glasses on the futon,
the narrow hallway strung with Christmas lights
illuminating thrift store paint-by-numbers?
Billie Holiday was singing “Lady Sings the Blues,”
her voice like a lady’s shoe, worn-in, refined.

I remember pondering the present
I would give you a few days later
in Ashtabula on Christmas Eve,
neatly wrapped and hidden under
the bungalow’s sagging eaves
(more vinyl, a Coltrane/Hartman reissue).
The snow would be falling in Ohio too;
your grandparent’s house filled with the smell
of Scottish shortbread and the sound of daytime TV.
When your grandfather died a few years later,
we listened to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”
at the service—your grandmother crying in black.

But what I remember most about that night
was later in bed, the snow subsiding,
the radiators clanking with warmth,
the Christmas lights casting colors on the wall,
your finger tracing songs across my back:
the stylus gliding to center, making me spin.

III

300 milligrams of Wellbutrin,
orange pills arranged in my palm
like hallucinatory ellipses, swallowed
to see where the last sentence will lead.
A bleak prescription: pain has a syntax;
grief, a simple grammar.
A land of blue shadows. An ocean of glass.

But that was years ago now, thank God.
I wrote poetry like crazy then,
on a word processor with a screen
the size of a paperback novel.

I smoked. Skipped class. Slept 17 hours at a time.
I scoured the dictionary for recondite words,
turning sesquipedalian over and over
in my mind, each syllable a sedative.
Like Rilke’s panther, I paced in cramped circles
around a paralyzed center, my winter boots
tracking mud along the brightly lit corridor
that led to the psychologist’s office.

One night I crashed
at my aunt and uncle’s
place in the foothills
and woke up alone with
a sense that the room, the house, maybe
the whole **** world was shuddering,
coming unmoored.
I retrieved my uncle’s .357 magnum
and tiptoed from room to room brandishing
an unloaded firearm in my boxer shorts.
The only sound, diffuse in the darkness,
was the gurgle of the fish tank filter.
I cocked the hammer, watching lionfish
swim in vibrant, agitated circles.
Next morning, I read the newspaper
and chuckled, having never felt
an earthquake before.

With a shock, I think back
to the Thanksgiving break
when I flew home from college
for the first time: the vertiginous
sensation of floating thousands of feet
above the Wasatch range, the mountains’
blue shadows and blinding snow
disorienting, my heart an unspun
compass incapable of pointing true.
The plane’s engines roared in ascent.

Decades later, I’ve landed:
married, with three children,
we drive across the country
in our minivan with the moonroof open,
howling out Tom Waits songs in unison.
Our moments together are conjoined
like tender marks of punctuation—
commas, semicolons, colons:
when the wind washes over us,
it whispers
and, and, and, and, and....

darling, don't get me wrong
I do know the truth
of darkness and blackness, the depth of dark blue
but darling lately I detect only the rosier hues
the sunlight and sun's breath
a kiss on the hand
the pink, sanguine shores of this blossoming land
I see promise and hope
the American Dream
in ten milligrams each day
All appears what it seems

Darling, don't get me wrong
I do know all else
the lull of the silence
of my innermost self