Once, the word was a whisper
carved into a cave wall
by a man who saw lightning
and wanted to marry it.
He did not know grammar,
but he knew:
****.
It is the sound a soul makes
when it remembers it left the stove on
in a past life.
It is a sneeze of truth,
a hiccup of the cosmos,
a four-letter eclipse
of reason and restraint.
“****,” says the poet,
when words betray him.
“****,” says the scientist,
when atoms refuse to behave.
It is the punctuation of panic,
the jazz note in an otherwise silent scream,
the laugh-track of God.
It means everything
when you don’t mean anything,
and it means nothing
when you feel everything.
It is both
the crime
and the confession.
The knock, the door, the absence of door.
So how do you write it?
You don’t.
You exhale it through clenched teeth
as you fall in love with a mistake.
You etch it into the back of a napkin
after three whiskeys and a revelation.
You scream it into a pillow
until the pillow understands.
Then you kiss it.
And never speak of it again.

“you’re so mature for your age”
i was 8
i don’t think i should be mature at 8
i shouldn’t even know what “mature” means
i should’ve been a kid but he robbed me

“YOU NEED TO ACT YOUR AGE”
i am!! i finally am!!!
i’m 14 and messed up completely
this is what it’s like now to be a teen

“act like an adult”
yet i’m treated like a child
no wonder you think im wild

your calling me crazed?
babe im freaking insane!!
i’m 16 and everytime that you call
i bang my head against the wall
i wanna KICK,
SCREAM,
and CRY!!
but that’s not how i should behave
it’s not how i was raised
because im “so mature for my age”

I am but punctuation to your wonder;
though not the important kind.
The optional kind.
The forgotten kind.

Alcoholism
is like bed wetting

You can grow out of it but
you have to stop ******* the bed

i told myself i was done.
scrubbed the bathroom tile like it was me that needed cleansing,
not the floor.
drank coffee instead of shots,
hit the gym,
got good at smiling again.
they said i looked better.
they always say that when you’re not dying in front of them.

but they don’t see
how the ghosts still come at night,
how the itch lives in the jaw,
in the back of the eyes,
like a ******* radio playing a station
you thought you turned off months ago.

i was clean.
for a while.
like the silence right before a scream -
that beautiful, dangerous quiet
where you think maybe you made it.
maybe this time you beat it.
maybe this time you win.

but addiction is smarter than you.
it waits.
doesn’t need to rush.
it knows you’ll come crawling
when the applause fades,
when the texts stop,
when the world gets boring again.

you think you’re sparing them,
keeping it tucked away,
like shame’s just a private little pet you feed
when no one’s watching.
but hiding it doesn’t protect them.
it just breaks them slower.
like they’re loving someone through bulletproof glass -
close enough to see the cracks,
too far to stop the bleeding.

and the worst part?
the worst part is that some days
you’re proud of how good you’ve gotten
at pretending.
how well you play “okay.”
like you deserve a ******* medal
for surviving your own lies.

truth is -
you don’t ever get out.
you don’t get cured.
you just get distance.
and even that -
that’s a rental.

because addiction
isn’t about weakness,
it’s about forgetting how to want anything
that doesn’t destroy you.

and maybe one day
i’ll be better.
but i’ll never be new.

and maybe that’s what clean really means -
not the absence of poison,
but the choice to keep waking up
even when it still lives
in your bones.