You are there, there, there
And I am here, here here.
Somehow we are both
At the center of a spinning universe
If I could I would keep you
At my center of centers
My heart of hearts
Of all that I am
Of all that I will be
Because it is the calmest place
And you deserve
A break from the storms.
But you are there, there, there
And I am here, here, here
And we are so very far apart.
May 15, 2015
May 15, 2015 at 7:24 AM UTC
I never had much of an ability to be anything except an emotional disaster. I didn’t spend a lot of time outside of my head, and when I did it was usually to dive headfirst into the head of someone else. I spent the vast majority of my daily life in a broken-down shell of myself masquerading as someone that had their **** together. For some reason, people accepted the facade. That’s what they usually ended up liking.
I always regarded myself as a disease. I had an incubation period that was relative to how long it took someone to get me to trust them. After that, the cells of my disease would rapidly multiply and explode, permeating the membranes of all of their senses and rationalities. My disease would break through the double-helix of their DNA and integrate itself in the fragile bridges of their nitrogenous bases, reflecting adenine for their thymine, cytosine for their guanine until finally the helix reunited, delicately interconnecting the chromosomes as I spilled out all the worst sides of myself.
The infectious agents of my toxicity would then slowly descend the ladders of hydrogen bridges and filter back out through the phospholipid bilayer to swim freely into their bloodstream, swimming through their veins to seek out the nervous system. Freely hopping along synapses, my disease gently touches neurons and triggers proteins buried deep inside their nuclei, causing the slow degradation and eventual apoptosis, killing off the ability to recognize that I am not a normal person.
The electrical impulses spread from axon to axon, igniting a ridiculous idea that I am no disease. The toxins follow the impulses, riding along the shockwaves. The toxins arrive in the mind and slide off the branches of electricity to hold fast to brain proteins, forcing them to take on the shape of the toxins and eroding holes in all the neural processing centers that govern reason and logic, robbing the person of the ability to detect all the red flags I wave frantically in front of their faces.
The toxins slide into the erosions and stand upon the corpus callosum, the delicate connection between the cerebral hemispheres, and wonder at the magnitude of the destruction they cause. They take a running start and leap from hemisphere to hemisphere and back again, skipping between the associative areas and primary cortices so the immune system cannot ever catch them.
They settle in the prefrontal cortex, the seat of neural power, the orchestra of complex thought. The toxins settle deep into the gyri and sulci, wedge themselves into the folds of all the grey matter.
Once infection is over, once I have eroded the very cytoskeletons that hold their cells together, they breathe, “I love you.”
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 10:16 AM UTC
Everything and nothing
Happened at the same time.
To someone else perhaps
It is just a smile
But to me
The universe explodes
When you are near
And I can hear
All the ringing in my ears.
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 9:23 AM UTC
I taught myself to walk through fire
Until the flames no longer burned
But my skin became scarred
And I couldn't see myself underneath it.
Ridges of scar tissue
Arranged themselves in your name
And I could swear
I saw your face among the embers.
I taught myself that pain was love
An inferno simply meant
That I was doing something right.
But the smoke began to choke me
And I could no longer see.
You left me to burn
But did you ever think
I could rise from the ashes?
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 8:54 AM UTC
If I must die,
Let it be as a leaf does in autumn.
A brilliant flash of color
Gentle drifting to the ground.
Oh, let me die as a leaf does
When the mornings are cool
And the air is crisp.
Let me dance upon the breeze
Let me rest upon the pavement.
If I must die,
Let it as a leaf does in autumn
Fading away
Before the cold of winter.
May 12, 2015
May 12, 2015 at 8:27 AM UTC
Somedays
He was all I had.
Somedays
I had no one at all.
I don't know which was worse.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 9:04 PM UTC
I sit down after shaking his hand.
He asks how I feel.
The earth has swallowed me.
(Can you say more?)
The sadness has weighed me down
So much that I sank into the darkness
Below this realm of existence.
But I can't survive without it.
The sadness has grown with me.
I am not myself without it
But I guess it would be nice
To never experience wanting to die.
(His face changes
These are damnable words.
He watches me.)
But I do
In a strangely casual sense.
The desire is not all consuming
And sometimes it retreats
To the distant corners of my mind.
But it is always there
Ready to leap out
The next time I fall apart.
And when it does
It remains for a while
A cool undertone
To all my self-loathing.
You know,
We are all going to die,
Just like we are all going to file taxes
And curse in traffic.
Perhaps it is just one more
Mundane task
I would rather just complete.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 9:01 PM UTC
If I close my eyes
I can see yours.
If I reach far enough
Into my memory
Perhaps I can feel you
Laughing
Breathing
Speaking
I know our quiet
Gentle moments
Because I have lived them so much more
Than once.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 8:56 PM UTC
He walks in
and the air leaves
my lungs
and
the room.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 8:53 PM UTC
It creeps in out of nowhere.
It climbs my spinal cord
Breeching vertebrae after vertebrae.
It slides across my neck
And coils on my shoulder.
It begins to speak
Hissing in my ear
And suddenly I am
Sick with fear.
It begins in my stomach and
It makes my hands shake.
You will never be good enough
It says.
I will never be good enough
I repeat.
I am
It is
My worst enemy.
It is a shadow
And I can never see the sun.
May 11, 2015
May 11, 2015 at 8:51 PM UTC