Living is staring at the spinning walls every night
Love is thinking about texting someone and forgetting
Happiness is driving for hours at a time with no end

Living is waking up with your liver hurting
Love is the daily phone call where you say everything is going just fine
Happiness is being able to watch hours of YouTube at night

Living is driving through the hills, windows down with some upbeat music
Love is recording my voice saying “I love you” and spending hours to change it so it’s not me but still sounds real
Happiness is a quilt my great grandmother gave me

Living is curling yourself up so tight that it hurts
Love is reading the same books multiple times because your heart hurts so much it makes you sick with how much you love the characters
Happiness is waking up and never getting out of bed

Living is the hand tremors
Love is the acid reflux
Happiness is from the bottom of the bottle

Living is dancing to songs early in the morning
Love is a warm bath with lavender
Happiness is the smell of spring cleaning

Whatever this is though
Doesn’t make me feel alive

My tinny laugh fills rooms my lungs could only hope to achieve
Merriment and the soul of old Bachus
fills this weary frame
I'm told I'm so full of life
The life of the party
So happy that I exhale living
I'm living
I am alone in my room
I'm living
Haggard blonde hair and purple eyes look at me in the mirror
my face is red, my marbles are bleeding
Thoughts of stories and characters I love with all my heart
emesis on pages that used to be blank
I talk to myself almost constantly
words and phrases repeated in a Tourettic staccato
Blinking away the inner rain as I walk into stores
"Sometimes I just get hit with an intense sadness
Where I want to curl into myself
Light the forge of my heart
Warm these dying limbs"
I am told I look so happy
And I wonder if I perhaps should have gone into acting
I feel so often like the cliche
asking myself in between podcast and music and ****
"It's...never going to get better is it?"
and I've spent so many years fighting to answer that question
I've spent many years fighting for the answers
in questions that I don't want to ask
I'm struck by fits of inexorable sadness
and two decades of reflection has given me nothing but these words
written in dark rooms
with my smiling face

The snow swirls around a cold room
Iron in my stomach
I'm burning up from the rotgut
Open a door to invite the flurries inside
Embrace my shivering limbs
Cool my throbbing stomach

Words come to me like spirits spilled across an ouija board
subliminally controlled and full of promises
we both know I can't keep
Whispers into the crimson contents of upturned bottles
Screamed into a porcelain bowl soon after
My body is dying
my organs are organizing a union against me
they demand water
less *****
maybe a walk around outside every once in a while
I find myself wrapped in a comforter of my own *******
I'm letting down my body
and so many other things
handed so many things
and failing to do anything with them
I'm a shell
I can't seriously think about anything
I can't seriously do anything
I have nothing left

The words in my head are buzzing between themselves
so angry
they want me to do something more, something different
like they have a mind of their own
they want to be me so bad
flesh and ***** instead of words and synapses;
I'm so sorry
I try so hard to say its not my fault
I curl into the bath with them
they whisper to me
taunt me
tell me I'll never be 'the show'
I try and numb myself but their words cut into me like a knife
heated to spread butter
their words fill my brains folds
and I walk around with my brain smoothed into my skull
I go into my moods
throwing, creating, drinking
forcing ideas into the wall
the miserable sound stings as the slide down
my skull;
the first whispers down my spine
making my feet hurt
after standing all day in dress shoes;
the second whispers along the walls
teasing what others have said;
the third sits inside me
telling me what I really need to hear from myself;
I **** and moan and rage
as they talk among themselves
they tell me most don't have a voice
that controls them
they say they control the voice
I call *******;
There's a voice inside me that doesn't want others to know he exist
and tries to stop me from knowing him;
these insects plague me;
the voices can't be played with
trapped in my head
but they become flies
trying to suffocate me in sleep
I swipe at them
my hands joining them in the air symphony
I fold in on myself
it hurts
it hurts a lot
my body is telling me to go
my mind is screaming stop
I hug them both in bed at night.
Trying to convince one to take the blame

There's a bluebird in me
He drowns in my left ventricle
Shots of liquor and stories
After I shout at him to be quiet for one more evening
Let my hands dance across what they may
The paper, the keys, the strings, the body
I hush him when he whimpers
Telling him tomorrow he can breath
He wants to get out

I talk to him when he flutters
I ask if he wants this to end
Sure things are bad
He can’t sleep as the frogs croak in my throat
And the violinist plays my intestine strings
But I glare at him
Telling him he wants to give up the good times
Accusing him
What about the smiles on our friend's faces?
What about being real to us?
What about the success we’ve made soaked with our whiskey-stained tears?
He wants to get out

When it's late, I let him out
There is no shortage of alone time with him
He never feels lonely in our tango
I let him fly around my room as I toss and turn
We watch the lights of the parking lot fly across the walls
Looking at the designs our blindness gives us
Can we find a story on those walls?
A phrase, an idea
We often go to bed tired and wake up so
With the lights giving us nothing
He wants to get out

I whisper to him that he is right
Neither of us believes me
But he will always be trapped in my heart
And he can’t ****** me to change
The lights are telling us a story of a bird
Trapped in a cage.
We won’t talk about who it is
But they want to get out

Skin falls around my nails like so many ribbons
They gum up my keyboard
Trying to stop my fingers from completing their duet
Across these blank keys
I pause
To bite a nail
To drink some water
To look around me
Fall out of the moment
Life is just a series of pauses
Flying by to fast to recognize
But a moment isn’t a point
It’s this big messy thing
A moment is the edge of your vision
No hard lines, just a melding of there and not there
Like water flowing from one spot to the next
No matter where it is

Words flow through this point like it was being fed by a vein
Each pump of this mechanical failure spilling them out
I use the finest tipped pens
to create such delicate lines
I am writing this on a legal pad
Sitting in the nurse's station
I write whatever I can
Wherever I can
This is written on the back of some notes I took on a patient
Who twist his words without even realizing
Just how caught up in himself he is
I see so much of myself in him
So much of a life I've been fighting to end
So obsessed with myself while hating the very idea of narcissism
Humble to show those I could be
I was nice, I was there, I was
Different
That was before though
Before college
Before friends
Before my liver became harder than I ever could after starting Prozac
I am so different than him now
But I have to wonder
Will I say the same thing about myself now
After a few years
Will I be writing this
Again?