Do you ever want to spit your own tongue out
Apologize to God for using it as a sword to slit your own throat after absent-mindedly digging into the hearts of others with your words

Do you ever want to shove your brain into a suitcase and "accidentally" leave it on a train headed for the bottom of the sea
Because you don't know how to use the thoughts that have grown from your own brain stem

Are you ever allergic to yourself?
Do you sneeze as you sniff your own stupidity?

Do you want to soak in a bathtub full of forgiveness
Wash yourself with the soap of solitude
(re-surface your skull)

Well
I need to remember that nobody is perfect
And that I shouldn't hate myself

But all of me has self-destructed for existing
How do you stuff a pipe cleaner into a soul

How to come back from that

How to clean out the inside of a straw

How to yank open a locked-jaw and leave it gaping
in order to be filled with the endless

love
mercy
acceptance

Offered by the Person who has created me

into more than I could have ever been by my--

self.

when i was 13,
"if your friends jumped
off a cliff would you?"
was an effortless,
"no"
because when i was 13
the cliff was a tall,
intimidating
piece of land
with a neon sign that said
"impending doom"
lit up at the edge,
but now im 20
and the cliff
comes in glass bottles
and the cliff
comes in thick syringes
and the cliff
is drawn beneath
my skin
in india ink
and down below it,
i can see my home town
and i can hear the patient voices
of the kids i grew up with
that never got out,
shakily shouting
"come down here;
it's easier at the bottom"
and if im being honest
im stumbling toward it
with an alarming
lack of fear

matter can't be created or destroyed
and something inside of my head tells me that i matter
or at least
tells me that i cannot destroy myself

i have always existed, in one form or another
it's just that i've only had a body for 21 years
and the rest of the time i was a little less than human

i have two choices
to be
or not to be
but i don't think Shakespeare ever took a science class

we have-- to be
and we can decide what to be
but we cannot decide if we are or are not

we never chose that

our existence
is a beautiful mystery

one that i wish to understand

there are only two choices
to be
or not to be
like God

we are the pilots of our own experience

where will we go
what will we look at
who will we look up to

will we absorb everything the night scene has to offer us
or will we open up in the daylight like the flowers growing from a dunghill

we are stuck on a planet poisoned with
pride
****
pieces of the devil lodged in the crannies of our soul

but who am i?
i have to be--
i have to be--
something
(but my choices haven't defined me all the way yet)

i listen to "pompeii"
as it burns itself to pieces on the radio
and rises like a phoenix (with no beginning) from the ashes when i repeat the lyrics to myself over and over again

"where do we begin
the rubble
or our sins?"

where did i (the phoenix) begin
in the rubble or
my sins?

are we taken from dust and returned to dust ("how am i gonna be an optimist about this?")

or are we taken from the ashes and redeemed

am i the city everybody loved whose "walls kept tumbling down"

if i was "left to my own devices"
would i even begin?
or would i "close my eyes"
"bringing darkness from above"

but
if a "great cloud rolled over the hill"

could my sins be forgiven
could my sins be forgiven
yet?