It’s raining really hard here
because of course it is
I watch The Office to try and cheer myself up
but it’s Season Two where Jim is in unrequited love with Pam
and this predictably makes me feel really bad,
bad enough to prematurely spur on my already planned trip to the store
for beer and razor blades,
the beer because I’m out and
the razor blades because I found out that my pocket knife is pretty dull
I have Miranda July’s short story collection sitting on my shelf,
I got it for you a while ago
and I was planning on giving it to you for Valentine’s,
but I guess now it’s just going to stay on my shelf
and I’ll have two copies of it,
which is really embarrassing
in such an insufferably direct and human way
that it can’t be enhanced by metaphor -
I’ll probably end up giving it to you anyway
because I’m sure you’ll like it
even divorced from its context as a romantic gesture
I’m pulling the nausea inducing maneuver
of sending drunk videos to all my friends,
alternating between complaining and singing
and through an absolutely incredible display of willpower
I resist the urge to send you one,
mostly because I’m pretty sure that
you’re doing totally fine without me
and a drunk video
would be correctly construed as childish and attention seeking,
eliciting an eye-roll at best
and a complete loss of respect
and the chance that you’ll talk to me again at worst
You’re probably out having fun with your friends
because you actually have friends -
the closest thing I have to a friend here left unannounced for the weekend,
and in the kitchen I can hear one of my roommates
stop in the middle of a story about dancing with some girl at a party last night
just long enough to answer a call from his girlfriend,
and I can’t stand being anywhere in the world,
especially not here in my closet of a dorm room
I cut from the outside in,
getting steadily closer and closer to the vein,
like an unsure child afraid to jump into its parents’ arms,
so that by the time I’m finished
it looks like I’ve been keeping track of the days on my wrist
I’m listening to Johnny Foreigner while lying on my floor
and I sing along really loud to the start of Champagne Girls I Have Known,
“She says it’s written in the stars but I don’t look at the stars anymore -
I just want someone to die for”
and that brings my roommate to my door,
he knocks and asks if I’m alright
and I get up and answer the door without thinking,
he sees the blood all over my shirt and the bandages on my wrist
and says “What the **** dude, are you ok?”
and I say “Yeah, I just fell,”
and I can tell immediately that he doesn’t buy it,
because why would he,
but I cut him off before he can say anything else and
tell him to take a picture of me,
so he does and then leaves me alone again
after taking away my empty gin bottle,
and I still have the picture on my phone,
me slumped in my chair with a barely mustered smile,
I debate all night about whether or not to post it to Facebook so you can see it,
but ultimately decide that it would be too desperate and juvenile even for me
I’m texting Amanda, not because we’re even that close,
because we’re not,
but because she’s the only person
I’m more than fifty percent sure won’t tell anyone
about me flailing around my room
and openly crying about you,
and, trying to be nice, she says,
“She doesn’t even know what she lost,”
I want to sort of scoff at this,
but I just say “A boring *******
and she says
“You’re not boring, but you are sometimes an *******
(and I say that in the most loving way possible, haha)”
she asks me if I’ve ever thought of getting help
and after I finish laughing
I tell her that I’m gonna get my psychiatrist to up my dosage,
and she says, “Is that a good idea with how much you drink?”
and I say “No, technically I guess not, but neither is drinking at all,”
and she says “Okay, just making sure.”
I wake up to a bunch of texts from my friends
because apparently they got worried
when all my Snapchat videos of me drunkenly singing
with blood all over my shirt
also contained the obligatory mumbling of
“I wanna **** myself so ******* bad.”
Mike asks if I’m still alive
and I say yes, unfortunately,
and he says, cool beans.
That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say
it’s really hard for me to be at all honest or immediate,
not that I necessarily wanted him to be all, you know,
“Please be careful because you’re my friend and I care about you,
if you need to talk just let me know,”
or something like that,
because that would have felt really uncomfortable and disingenuous
considering our friendship,
but I don’t know, I’d just like to be able to earnestly express myself
in a real, physical scenario without cringing about it forever
Basically all I accomplish all weekend
is spending my last ten dollars on alcohol and drinking all of it the same night,
so now I am literally broke and also
literally out of alcohol,
but I’m sure it will be fine because
nothing bad has ever happened as a result
of my being alone with my thoughts for an extended period of time
I told myself that I wouldn’t write any poems about this,
but my sentimentality got me here
and there’s a comically slim chance that it could get me out
Feb 7, 2016
Feb 7, 2016 at 10:18 PM UTC
One of these days
I’m going to get tired of
trying to think of clever ways to say that
I want to **** myself
and just **** myself
I’m scared about telling my psychiatrist
that I want to up the dosage on my Prozac
because even though it’s true I don’t know
if I can be emotive enough to convince her
that it’s necessary, that I can feel in my chest
the urge to empty a pill bottle into my mouth
one at a time, and that I’m so sick of looking
at oncoming traffic so tenderly -
I have this horrible image of her letting me down easy,
telling me to get more sleep and work on my diet
But if that happens my ace in the hole is telling her
that now that I’m living by myself
I have a lot more freedom to act out
on my constant suicidal fantasies,
because there is no one for a hundred miles
whose potential sadness is enough to stop me
from seeing myself out
Telling her that the first time I got drunk
I finally realized that I have the opportunity
to externalize my wanton desire for self destruction,
and that I don’t have to try and hide my notebooks
full of sentences like
“Suicide is the most rational action available to us as human beings,”
and I can tell my friends that I want to **** myself
without having to whisper
I’m laughably resentful of the people I love
and more importantly the people that I think love me
because I feel like they’ve nailed my feet to the ground,
and I literally cannot even imagine my mother’s reaction
on hearing that I died on a hospital bed of an overdose
or that I jumped off the parking garage near my dorm
or that I blew my brains out and the lifeless mound of flesh
that was her son
didn’t even have the decency to tell her goodbye
Feb 1, 2016
Feb 1, 2016 at 4:36 PM UTC
Last week my History professor was talking about British Imperialism in India
while I was busy watching a row of ants
make their way from the trash can to
a hole in the wall,
and I mentally checked in just in time to hear him say,
“If you don’t believe the future will be any better, what’s the point of living?”
and I wanted to laugh at the top of my lungs,
but I just kept taking notes
Last night
I downed three times the recommended dosage of sleeping pills with beer,
which is obviously really bad for you,
but obviously not bad enough,
because I still woke up
I got you Anne Sexton for your birthday because I love her,
but also because I have a real affinity for writers who killed themselves,
because I feel like they’re doing laps around the pool
while I’m still looking down from the diving board
Jan 24, 2016
Jan 24, 2016 at 5:45 PM UTC
God stares at the lamb nailed to our door like an art exhibit.
Stroking his chin. Nodding. Moving to the next.
Let me gag on dirt you dug up from an old grave,
eyes full of re-purposed blood
and smiling like a thief hearing sirens drive off in the wrong direction
Let me fall like the statue of an overthrown dictator,
the people innately understanding that they are witnessing
the dawn of a new holiday
as my row of crooked teeth gets straightened by the concrete
I am writhing on the ground
and a crowd is gathering
and I tell them that everything is fine
and they don’t believe me
but they don’t do anything to stop me either
I want to chain every bit of decay in me
to a television tuned to static
and stand up from my foxhole.
I want a dead raven nailed through my heart.
I want the world to wipe the sweat from its brow
and put me back where I belong.
Just get on with it.
Stop putting it off.
Finally and forever buried under all the dust I’ve been gathering.
Jan 23, 2016
Jan 23, 2016 at 8:56 PM UTC
It was there, I at the sea and you in the mountains, each of us looking up and loathing the same sky, our heartbeats dissolving like runaway trains in the distance en route to unknown destinations that we wondered why, if moments like this were possible (as apparently they were), they should be doled out to us so infrequently as to threaten our belief in them entirely.
Jan 21, 2016
Jan 21, 2016 at 9:24 PM UTC
I tell you I'm going to write something drunk,
but it's past midnight and the pen is still of ink
despite being more than a handful of shots in
and staring at a page for what seemed like ten whole minutes
but was probably more like two
I text you saying this
and I'm probably a lot more disappointed than you are
because for me the whole conceit
is that I would inevitably write something about you,
and anything about you would probably be closer to genius
than to garbage
I'm not sure what I thought you would say,
it was really more of an offhand comment
to keep the conversation going because
we are both drunk and we are both alone
but what you say, in that sort of ironic deadpan
that only a text without punctuation can convey is,
"You've written these texts"
I say (because I really am, in an idiotic smile way),
"Mind blown"
and you say,
"Write about that"
and I say,
"I will"
Because I'm just in control of my faculties enough
to have the small revelation
that the line between what I write down and what I say to people
is totally arbitrary and self imposed -
not anymore arbitrary than anything else I guess
but that's not the point
Jan 17, 2016
Jan 17, 2016 at 3:06 PM UTC