I.
Wet dreams will be fifty percent nightmare. You do not bleed but there will be blood.
Conceptualizations of the violent as ****** the ****** as violent.
You are the word survivor but you are not thinking about your **** when you put your hands between your legs.

II.
If you handcuff yourself they cannot do it again; your wrists are already occupied.
If you leave bruises dark as night on your own legs the yellow ones they pressed there do not compare and they have become weak.
A candle in a cathedral blown out is not darkness until the wax has cooled.

III.
You will become a protest ground, occupy your own body. It is not empowerment it is defense. The Russians burned cities in the wake of their retreat and it was not brave.
You will stand in your own ashes because you are better than an army (you wish you believed it).
Thus shall be your prayer, an offering of your own entrails lain upon an altar to yourself.

IV.
You have a dream that your childhood house burns down and it’s exciting, there’s a second where you feel wind and the heat and you breathe deep.
Destruction is euphoric. To shrug material is to shrug some semblance of sentiment.
Memories change in retrospect and we are made not by the other but by ourselves. Decontextualization is a falsehood.

V.
You are nothing if not connections between all you have witnessed; therefore, witness yourself.
Become worship to your actions, your body. Expect the things you expect of a deity and when you touch forces powerful enough to hurt you become that force. You are constructed and thusly you may construct yourself by your choosing.
Play god with your own guts. Trust me, you have swallowed stars and you have swallowed ****, the pain it takes to cut them out of your stomach will be well worth it when you lay them across your bedroom floor.

VI.
You are all tenses (past, present, future) but you are not tense (on edge, high strung, stressed).
The only commitment you have made is yourself.
For what do words and kisses mean against occupation of a form?

VII.
You don’t remember a period in which time passed at a constant rate perhaps because it never did and perhaps because memory foregoes time.
Time in waiting rooms is gone from your head.
Doctor’s offices are half your adolescence and they are erased; you are not sad for it.

VIII.
There was a point when you wrote love poetry for your ****** and it said in a million ways “I want your feelings for me,” and then you did not want them.
You stopped wanting them.
You did not stop loving but you do not love with everything because it is an invitation.

IX.
This is not for the masses, for you must hold your own mass. Harmonize against your own hymnals and confess to your bathroom mirror.
You do not drink communion wine and yet you lick your wounds. Drink deep, gorge yourself on yourself. Become giddy with it.
You are red wine, you are power, you are a stimulant and a depressant at the same time. You are the ebb and flow of tidal waves and you are the shore they destroy (later, you will be the shore they create). You are every force of nature and there is no necessity for comparison because you are also every force of man.

I.
There has been a death,
a sickness,
a love affair,
a calamity,
a journey.

II.
You are none the better
but you are none
the worse.

III.
You start missing them,
finally,
when you are driving home one day.

IV.
You made a lot of jokes about this.
More than were appropriate - all of you
did.
It was the best you could do
when it happened when everything
happened and now you are
still laughing at the ghost of things you all said
two months ago when it was as though the door
would still open.

V.
You live in that room now.

VI.
You live in that room and it doesn't even smell like him anymore.

VII.
You don't feel guilt. You feel guilt about a lot of things but not about
this.
This was not your fault, this was no one's fault and
you know it.
You all know it.

VIII.
Sometimes you find it very ironic that you
are still alive.
You wonder if he ever considered, in the six months before,
the idea what one step eleven stories up would determine
not only the loss but several people's
unwillingness to die.

X.
The joke you made was that killing yourself is no longer original.

I.
You do not have to speak to your ****** again as long as
time lasts,
probably.

II.
You are
legitimately safe now.

III.
You have never felt so jumpy.

YOU WERE A YEAR OF WHATEVER YOU WERE A YEAR OF
a year i could have stayed inside forever

YOU WERE THE FUEL TO MY FIRE YOU WERE THE WOOD THAT
only ever made me burn higher

YOU WERE THE GRIND ON THE DANCE FLOOR THE ONE NIGHT
in heaven the one night i didn't think about her not once i was alright

YOU WERE THE SHARED CLOTHES SO QUICKLY FORGOTTEN
on my floor, do you still want them back, i've stopped sleeping with them

YOU WERE THE DRESS PULLED TOO TIGHTLY THE SHIRT
pulled right off i let you see something no one else had with my permission

YOU WERE THE PILLS DOWNED AT MIDNIGHT THE LAST
glass of ***, shared & burning; turning into the rack where my fears are hung

YOU WERE MY EARLY FALL YOU WERE MY
you were my early fall.

I.
******* just think if Van Gogh had taken anti-depressants
he might not have painted and *******
if I had said "No" loud enough I might never
have picked up a camera and

II.
******* if I hadn't been the reason my ****** never killed herself -
and ******* if you didn't take a step back when I said "her" -
******* I wouldn't be fighting for **** all and holy
**** if anyone had said something when I started going quiet
and

III.
******* we call ourselves artist's because we create and
******* we create because we were destroyed but
******* I will go to hell before I will call my ******
my muse.

I.
You don't use the word ****.
It's overly strong, you don't deserve validation like that.

II.
You talk about hands a lot.
There is not much else to talk about.

III.
You want to talk about surroundings,
but there are several different scenarios in which it happened,
and
you are not sure if it was multiple times
or a faulty memory.

IV.
You try hard not to talk about names.
You're supposed to know that, want some kind of vengeance or something;
you have two or three good guesses.
Hands feel like hands , faulty memory looks & sounds like
the smoke in the summer time when the wildfires
grow large enough to keep you inside for days on end.

V.
It isn't enough to go on.
You do not call it anything aside from
"I have trauma".
Trauma could mean anything; it is beautifully vague.
Maybe someone hit you (maybe they really did, sometimes
you almost remember it).
Maybe it was worse than that or maybe it was a book you read,
over & over & over & over.

VI.
You are over & over & over & over
and you wish you were over & you wish it was over.
You don't use the word ****. Over & over & over & over,
you don't have it in you to use the word ****.

I.
You were the blood between my legs an idol a
nightmare a meltdown a
moment between breathing & reaching for an inhaler that you never
put into my hand.

II.
You are the blood between my legs you are still
the hands I think of every time I cannot stop it but I know it's
natural & I know it's meant to be that way
most months.

III.
You are the blood between my legs both the scars it comes from and
the place it falls from the way it should if I were to
remain a girl.

IV.
You will be the blood between my legs the reason I ruin every
pair of underwear I own the reason I cannot use
a more effective method of mopping it up the reason I'm
startled every morning you are the fingernails that did it
you are what I think of you are vicious femininity you are
every kind of trauma every kind of torture you are
the reason I cannot stop being afraid of blood.

V.
You are all over me. You are hands down a skirt that I
do not want to be wearing you are hands up a dress that I never
wanted to put on you are hands across a chest that I want
to mutilate you are hands hands hands and you are
too sharp too fast too forceful and I am looking at the blood
between my legs and you are that and yet you never
let it touch you
nor did you help me clean it up.