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.

We are growing up wrong --
Let me rephrase,
There is nothing wrong with the way in which we are growing up.
We are wrong.

We are becoming whispered secrets behind closed doors --
the information with which to bind safely, advice on a name --
Quickly passed off goods as though it were illegal to
Own a binder, a packer, a mens tie.

We are becoming men,
And yet we were never boys, not really.
Not in the way we would have liked to be.

We will be fighting the rest of our lives,
Lying, probably. Lying, when it doesn't feel like lying --
"When I was a, well, a boy scout.." But you weren't.
You were a girl scout.

We are covering our tracks to hide the identity we've worked so hard to obtain --
No one but each other will ever be proud of us.
Not for this.
Not for the hardest fight of our lives.

I.
You bleed in places boys are never meant to bleed;
You want to make yourself bleed in more places because of it.

II.
There will be places on your body that are no longer for touching.
They mean nothing to you, but the nerve-endings interaction with another hand will let you know they’re real.
They cannot be real.

III.
You will hear love songs, and you will want to rip your own lungs out in your fist.
They give you enough trouble anyways.

IV.
You never do rip your lungs out.
You cannot fit your fingers down your throat, and your ribs are too strong for your too small hands to break.
You cough when it’s cold out and laughing has hurt for months.

V.
You tell people that you reach out to them when you need to.
You reach out to them on good days.
You do not tell them that the days on which you cannot even form the words to ask for their help are they days you need it, and you do not expect them to know this.

VI.
You talk about escaping like it’s going to fix things.
You think about escaping as though it means ripping open your skin and walking away from it.

VII.
You think about what is wrong with you and you conclude you are unlovable.
The statement is not untrue.
You will hold up your own broken bones as proof.

VIII.
You sit in the bath for three hours and you look at yourself and you look at the ceiling.
You do not punch the walls anymore; it was loud and someone asked about the slamming.

IX.
You put your own hands around your neck for hours but you never tighten them.
You do not want to be disappointed in their lack of strength.

X.
There will be fingernail marks across your chest for a few days.
You will not see them, no one will see them.
No one wants to see that, and you cannot bear to look.

I.
You never wrote a break up poem for your first love.
You never fell in love again & you never will.

II.
You never had a break up to write about with your second love.
It was slow, soft, a gentle falling apart, an easy descent into
whatever this is, whatever it means that you don't
acknowledge their eyes anymore you pretend you never
hear it when they laugh.

III.
You haven't talked in weeks but it's hitting you now;
someone who held you down on bed springs, someone who
held you in their arms at all.

IV.
You're mourning a death of
months ago.

I.
An unending desire to relinquish power
must be handled with care.

Hell is relative.

It's a disambiguation of the horrors and
disintegration of the self.
A destruction of the knowledge and
delineation of the time.

"I will see you in hell",
has always struck me as a funny sentiment.
No two hells shall be the same.

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 don't recall it feeling this ****** up to say those words;
You don't recall anything & you don't want to.

I.
No one writes poetry about you. You are
an enigma, you are an enigma of unreality and
displeasing angles, too many
bones inside a shell covered with marks you
put there yourself on the best of days on the
worst of days the days you
can't remember.

II.
You watched a Swedish film once called
"Boys" and you think about it often because when
they said the word "homosexual" it was subtitled as
"******", and when they said the word "transgender", the subtitles
said "******".  You are like those subtitles
in your own head, over and
over.

III.
You'll make a film someday and you will
yell the word ****** from an overpass, and you preface it
with "I am a", and you will make it
poetry.

I.
And I finished the playlist I made for you.
It's lovely, once you listen
seven times.

II.
I appreciated when you told me nothing would change but
may never know if you were lying.

III.
If you believed that,
did you also believe I was the one changing things?

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.

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.