I finally nicked an artery.
Blood pulsing out with every heartbeat.

Going deeper
gets easier
everytime
and now
I can't go
much deeper
without dying.

And I don't want to stop.
I don't think I can.
I wasn't supposed to live this long anyways.
Such a shame.

This isn't a poem.
I just have nowhere else to put this.

I had a dream
I guess you could call it a nightmare
You were there

I don't remember what we were doing
I was distracted by my leg
The bad leg that never stops hurting
It turned bright red
Swelled up
Hurt so bad I writhed around until
I finally decide to saw it off
To stop the pain

I don't remember what you were doing
Just watching i think
Or maybe you didn't notice
But I was glad that
you were there.

...

Perhaps one day I might find myself at peaceful
equilibrium. A state of quiet contentment far
more pure and gratifying than the manic
thrills I once mistook for happiness.

Perhaps one day I might find myself on a modest
plot of land out near Bozeman, Montana. Standing there
naked and free in the golden chill of dawn,
drinking my morning coffee in quiet miracle bliss.

Perhaps one day I might find myself as unbroken,
and as worthy of love, as I always was from the start. My soul
unbound and independent, yet even still connected
umbilical with another just as whole.

I am learning a lot these days.
Or at least I'm trying.

I am trying to learn about bread and blood types and shale oil economics and Rocky Balboa.
The triangular fibrocartilage complex.
The Kennedy family.
Chinese billionaire real estate investment and the reign of Xi Jinping.
And, you know, other similarly interesting kinds of things.

But, most importantly,
I am trying to learn how to be happy.
Or, at the very least,
I am trying to learn how to try to be happy.

I am trying to learn what happiness really is.

If it's some strange ethereal something in plain view just behind some stranger still wall of glass that I haven't quite learned how phase my mind and body through
--or by what strength or courage or cowardice it might take to shatter and simply walk past.
Or if it's something else entirely...
A myth, intangible yet important.
A legend, absurd.
A god, disturbingly ambivalent.
Perhaps it is the warmth on my skin and the chill in the breeze on this first month of spring.
Perhaps it is the water and oxygen that flows through every living thing.
Perhaps it is that wall of glass itself.

I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know if happiness is real.
I don't know.
I don't even know what it is I'm actually trying to learn.
I don't know if I am learning what happiness really is or if I am learning that it truly doesn't matter either way.

I am learning a lot these days.
Or at least I'm trying.

I am learning that perhaps it is less salient to try to be to be happy
and perhaps instead I should just
simply be
happy.

We used to be twenty
sitting around complaining
and smoking
like twenty year olds do.

Now we're thirty
sitting around complaining
and vaping
like twenty years olds do.

"Free speech is dead!"
He proclaimed loudly
into the

microphone.