The problem with people like me, people with the desperate need to disappear in to things purely for survival reasons, people who must give every last fiber of their being to things that perhaps are not worth the self that they’re giving, is that it cannot be sustained; it’s just not pragmatic at all. But the weight you bear from looking at yourself, I’m not even speaking of the image in the mirror, but looking at yourself mentally is so overwhelming that you cannot stand to be in your own presence to a point where you have accepted that your “self” has been dished out so carelessly you barely carry fragments of it anymore
I read once in a book, not a favorite book but one I related to in the most un-relatable way (if that makes sense), about this mathematician Kurt Godel who was obsessed with the fear of being poisoned so he refused to eat anything his wife hadn’t cooked. When his wife was hospitalized, his fear was so debilitating that he chose to starve himself to death instead of tackling it. The protagonist of the book continues to explain that Kurt lived with those Demons for 71 years until they finally got him. Understanding your crazy or your spiral or that itch under your skirt that just won’t stop burning no matter how much you scratch it, doesn’t make it less of a problem or an easy fix. Its there, as real as a chronic illness that’s slowly decaying your body from the inside out, worse even because you cannot explain it away. You can’t make people understand why you don’t have your **** together anymore or why its harder to balance things anymore or why you can’t clean you room everyday, or get out of bed, or just be there with your friends talking and laughing without wanting to disappear back in to the comfort of your shell that isn’t even comfortable anymore.
Your whole existence becomes one giant cursive that you’ve been trying to master but always ends up having too many unnecessary curves and scratches, and becomes ugly instead of graceful like your mind and your thoughts and this whole ******* paragraph.
The problem with people like me is that we don’t know that we’re too much at times and too little when it counts and its exhausting being this- always.
Oct 26, 2021
Oct 26, 2021 at 11:50 AM UTC
I simply wish to fade in to oblivion
Like a sand castle washed away by the ocean
My essence scattered,
As if I was nothing but a speck of dust in the wind
Forgotten
Forever
Sep 20, 2020
Sep 20, 2020 at 2:21 PM UTC
We see
Evolution
As only the physical aspect
Of who or what we are
We see
Change
And we think growth
But growth should start with in
In the depth of our being
Beyond length or width
So that when eyes gaze upon us
An impression is left
Like the vast space above our head
With its stars and the moon and vacuum
An impression
A need
To know and to be touched
By a depth that is beyond explanation
Nov 6, 2019
Nov 6, 2019 at 2:56 AM UTC
So I’m sitting here, partially feeling the sun caress the side of my face between the shrubs that grew to be pretty enough not to be a nuisance, the heat weakened to a point that could be considered enjoyable as it can only be at 4 in the afternoon, watching people lost in their comfortable moments, listening to jazz being released from the speakers across the room. The half lit cigarette on my fingers burning away with every drag, better relaxing my oh so anxious mind like a lullaby heard with a drowsy mind.
It makes me think of all writers with broken souls; Virginia Woolf who said “You cannot find peace by avoiding life” And Silvia Plath who questioned “Is there no way out of the mind?” And I wonder if their peace came from flashes of instances like these, where they could only lose themselves in a crowed of other people’s lost moments and be able to revere in them.
Nov 6, 2019
Nov 6, 2019 at 2:56 AM UTC
I wake under the covers of plastic wrapped around my body; the sealed bag suffocating my lungs, turning them in to a world of silent aching. The piercing light from the windows penetrates my shelled eyes and I remember I don’t really need to breathe anymore. “Cadaver” my children call me. I have no other word to explain them as I know they have no other phrase to explain me. I am no longer inside the spectrum of names for in them laid an intimacy one could never hand to one so cold. I am the decimated clay in their hands but instead of them putting me back together, I marginalize myself with in them, with in their brains, under their probing hands, I live and I thrive, their minds my new home.
They hover over me, their touch a mixture of curiosity and displeasure as if their subconscious hadn’t yet adapted to my rough, cracked skin. My memories engulf me while I bear witness to the way my body comes apart, almost like silk underneath the scalpel, dancing the edge of the blade as gracefully as a ballerina.
‘I am a man’ I think to myself, ‘a man made in God’s image.’
However, the carved pieces of myself falling to the floor make me doubt my own thoughts. My senses have expired yet I wish to feel again, even when I’m peeled down to my bone, I wish to sense these curious hands upon me. I wish to feel my lungs fill with the city air, all the smoke and the stench of the sewers, the odor of the ground after a light drizzle, the sweat and breath of the people out on a stroll, I dream for it all to overwhelm my senses as it used to. My veins are empty of life and of blood, while my heart sits idle beneath my broken ribs, waiting for a ****** that will never come.
“Limbs aren’t meant to stay idle.” My father used to say while he was young and vibrant. Now I know his limbs, they too lay idle six feet under while they slowly rot away. Mine seem to be too battered to want the excitement of movement; under their nakedness lay all the mystery of Gods genius in its purest form.
They have left me here as an exhibition as though I had not been enough entertainment in life, as though my every waking moment had not been one roller coaster ride after the other, an emblem of unadulterated neglect from both God and man. And still I am forced to be situated on this stale bed day after yearning day until I am not enough to fill anything. But I suppose this is the true meaning of being a father, giving oneself so completely that at the very end of it, you are that something that dissipates in to the night air, shattered in to a million pieces but still knowing you will live on.
Aug 9, 2019
Aug 9, 2019 at 5:14 PM UTC
So you see
We're a parade of soft silky flesh
A mask on battered and broken bones
A plague on beauty
Parasites that drain the soul of the earth
Like we do with one another
Cherry lips covered in lethargy
******* the life out of the shoulders we lean on
And still
The wind whispers "prosper"
While the trees breath essence
Down our cracked throats
Building
And rebuilding
Like a potter mends his clay
We forget
In our blinding pride
We're only a fraction of the unrecognized particles of the universe
Aug 7, 2019
Aug 7, 2019 at 5:20 PM UTC
I saw, in her eyes
A sense of what could never be
While she wrote goodbye
Letters in her smiles
And when the sun rose
She'd let it hide the shadow
Clinging to her shoulders
Like a forgotten memory
On the surface,
So that all the world
Noticed was a mirage
Of pent up brilliance,
I saw, in her
A fear of dawn
And I told her
Close your eyes
So I won't have to see myself
Aug 3, 2019
Aug 3, 2019 at 2:37 PM UTC
I see green in my dreams
Reflected in a sky the color of a mirror
And you may argue
Mirrors have no colors
But I say they do
They are any shade you wish to present them
They hold the color of evidence
And truth in their golden hues.
"I see green in my dreams"
I told my godfather
Bargaining in his infinite wisdom
He looks at me through eyes
Heavy with age
And tells me"I see you have learned to hope."
"No" I say shocked
"Its not right for a person
to feel like they have to protect themselves from love
Its not right
To want to be invisible
Just to escape future abandonment
Its not right
To hope against hope
And suffocate your lungs with false truths
Convincing enough
To let yourself down
Its not right
To keep yourself from wanting big things
Because "you don't deserve them"
Its not right!"
"Perhaps," i say getting ready to leave, "But I do them anyway."
Jun 8, 2019
Jun 8, 2019 at 7:51 AM UTC
My Father used to say “poetry is in everything; darling, even in the way you listen.”
That was before he burned all his books
And moved across the street and miles away
But I hold no grudges
For he has thought my ears more intimacy than my brain ever could
Maybe that’s because they’re prone to ‘unrequited love’
And when Yuna said “you don’t wanna belong to me because freedom feels better”
I understood why my mind never confessed to my heart
What it witnessed heartbreak do to my soul,
Perhaps Marvin Gaye explained it better
When he sang “I want you”
But you see, this piece of literature isn’t supposed to be about love
I wouldn’t dare call it poetry
But it is a work of art
Like the mix tape I made myself when I was counting my last days
First on that list was “hold on” by Alabama Shakes
I wasn’t oblivious to the irony in my choice
But I suppose I forget all about it when I’m lip singing to Gnarls music
“Does that make me crazy?”
“Probably!”
However, sad brad smith won’t let me give up
And in their words I hear “I want you to help yourself”
As if I was the guardrail to my own happiness
What they don’t see, though, is that
Nothing could ever replace the things I’ve lost
Maybe that’s why I have a certain weakness for sad songs
It could also be why I can find sadness in all happy things
And I know I’m not alone in this every time I hear
“The yawning grave” by lord Huron
He tells me “I’ve sent you omens and signs”
He tells me “I’ve thought you melodies, pomes and rhymes”
But I’ve lost faith in those omens
Because Hozier left his words printed on my chest
“There is something so tragic about you,” he said
I have to believe he knows me best
Well before I even began to know myself.
Sometimes I wonder if all I am is a patchwork
Of all the music I’ve ever loved
And the discarded pieces of all the once I didn’t have the heart to
Because every time I try to
It makes me want to scream “I can’t feel my face when I’m with you”
It makes me want to experiment and live
And blast “Novacane” in to my eardrums
Until all I can hear is the sound of forgetting
But when the play list ends I’m pulled back
By “remind me to forget”
With memories that thrive to live on the surface.
Perhaps I’m waiting to be saved
It could be the reason why my pulse quicknes
When Berhanas song plays in the back ground
“Go the whole wide world just to find you”
Until I’m slapped back to reality by my father’s words
One of many
That I couldn’t be forgiving enough to let go
I have my own escape though
On the rooftop across town
And when I look below
All I can see engraved on the earth
Are the words “wings wouldn’t help you down
down towards the ground, gravity’s proud”
So I take back my words
Truly, Bon Iver knows me best
For I’ve lived up the turret my whole life
Hoping someday my bones would grow feathers
That would protect me from the waves of solitude.
Apr 28, 2019
Apr 28, 2019 at 4:41 PM UTC
He was like a spark of lightning and just like lightening he could only be seen for a moment in time. He was fragile enough to let tiny moments affect him but at the same time he had the ability to let it all go, to let it dissipate in to the night where it all happened because unlike most people his days consisted of variation of nights.
There was the twilight; that soft touch of ray still existed, caressing him with happy thoughts. He had hope then. Dreams hadn’t turned in to foreign concepts and he didn’t have to lie to convince himself everything was okay. Then came the night. It confused him at first, seeming oddly desperate. The ground beneath him stopped being stable, instead, it developed a certain quality of being foam like, lopsided, unpredictable. It rocked his world until he finally fell and broke all the pieces that made him who he was.
It was then that midnight came with all its might. It consumed everything in its path so that nothing of the scattered sunlight remained to be a lantern of hope. He was utterly engulfed by it like the vortexes he read about on his sci-fi books and lasted so long it seemed the only thing he ever really knew.
He had this way, you see, where he would lay his neck on the edge of his bed so his head would dangle from it. His hair hanged loose and his eyes went glossy with the thoughts that fed on his mind. Then and only then could he see the world as it truly was. Wrong. Erroneous. Mistaken and invalid, like him, just like him. And maybe that was why people feared lightning; though it seemed to be the most beautiful thing every created, packed with electricity and electrons so powerful it had the power to form minerals under the earth, anything it seemed to touch it destroyed or at the very least, seared black. No body dare touch him because in the simplest of words, he was bad for the world.
Apr 25, 2019
Apr 25, 2019 at 1:24 PM UTC