The words-
pen to page, pull up nothing, just like yesterday.
Day before that, all but forgot about the pen, the words,

Forgot about the Feelings-
must be out of touch with

or did I
let them get so close,
let them undo the sentences,
those ink-blot bandages
wrapped tight around
the graceless lacerations,
Rorschach's mask muddying
the face I could not bear to recognize?

When the words come,
they come in quick as silver, sharp as a needle
and stitch themselves between
sense and skin.
The wound becomes "I am wounded,"
removed from the reality in its quotation marks.

They don't tell you healing feels like losing your best friend.

You've got a place in Times Square
you buy me nice things
you like how I look and
you like how I sing

I can't count all the stamps
that your passport has
your speech is refined
you can talk about jazz

But I know by the touch
of your soft, gentle hand
you're not hurt, you're not angry
you wont understand.

If *** is the joke
******* is a thirteen year old ******,
acne spots and sweat glands,
explaining the punchline.
Just pick one honey,
they all end the same with
you ******* inside of my body while
I fantasize you care
about the way we're drowning
in these shallow pools of dopamine.

I miss my soul.
It wasn't you who took it, this is not on you.
I gave it up willingly,
it's harsh and heavy demands no longer audible
amidst the screams of
"**** It"
at high volume on repeat.

But memory holds me in the inbetween
Devouring innocence, you will not become it.

The wheels of time keep turning,
breaking butterflies as they go.
The same ones that came for you
Are coming for me too, you know.

I traded ***** pixels, sold my soul
for a bathtub full of this cold city water,
to let it dampen the dissonance between the long talks, screams, and silence and
wash my memory clean.

I severed what I just ****** could not untie and floated north
to be lifted to the sky-island rooftops and above and
finally feel light.

Instead, my skin is crumpling like trash and
still I find my fingers crawling down my throat,
depressing,
the only way I know how to release
all the things I swallow whole
and let sink without bubbles.

We were all completely free
And it was completely horrible,

We just floated around and ****** and
drifted back out into space again.

“Where could I belong?” I whispered into the vacuum
I didn’t think anyone could hear me, but you
Pulled me in close.

For a while, it felt like falling
And then, like solid ground. And then,
There was nothing left to do but spin

It's hard to feel ****
when you're an unemployed college drop-out
who lives with her mother,
and your most recent achievement
is the stabilization of your short term memory.

I've got my thumb over the send button
of a text to a local ex
who was here in this same room
about, oh, five years ago
putting on his shirt while I
sat on this same bed,
neither ****** nor mother,
calculating the recent decrease in value of my soul.

When despair for the world restrains me,
when it becomes too difficult to feel anything at all
and I cannot move for the way my spinal column coils
the way snakes play dead,
I see my someday daughter like a conscience, like a ghost
Must she inherit all this darkness?

I retreat into the rhythm of my pulse,
Into a single cell’s brave journey from heart to brain
Unburdened by grief or forethought,
Flowing freely.
A heart is a heart,
and a stone is a stone;
I can choose to be soft like an animal, like trust.

I remember there is another world- it is tucked just inside this one.