It’s just past midnight, and I fall into a crouch in the middle of the living room.
It’s dark, not by design
But because I’ve failed three times to fix the **** light,
And I’ve only just realized I bought the wrong bulbs.
Such a small thing but I can’t convince myself to pull my hands from my eyes
Because suddenly the light means so much more than it should
All these things that aren’t what they’re supposed to be
Where they’re supposed to be.
Please come back and fix the light.

I keep eating things I shouldn’t.
Dreams, cars, ink, brick
These are the things that make me sick.
Skin, bone, flesh and scars
Topped with sugar, flush with stars
Love, death, silence still
Down the gullet, living will
Though I swore I wouldn’t
I’m eating things I shouldn’t
Again.

I don’t understand why love should save.
It’s sinking still
Stills of whiskey, mellow bitter.
Metal tinned, heavy and satisfying
It makes you weep and rage and sleep.
Aching toes and numb cheeks, silent sobbing into your pillow
For reasons that haven’t come to you yet.
Do you feel saved? For numbness? Dripping
Gaping mouths, searching.
Am I talking about love or a monster?
We can’t tell.
I won’t argue with results, fact sheets still dripping romantic slurs
But I will argue that saving is not what you think it is. Mercy
Is not what you think you’ve made it.

We are tired of years ago tired of to be tired.
I’m a clock in the shape of a woman, counting months in weeks
Weeks in days in hours in minutes in seconds
Recorded in the strands that make me
Water slipping through my hands, I’ll ask you to keep it safe
But you only have your own hands to use.

There are houses on this street filled with wolves.
He-wolves and she-wolves and wolf-whelps howling for meat
Scattered like snowflakes across the neighborhood.
It starts slow, and ends with “I lost my temper” “It was their own fault”
“All the better to see you with, my dear.”
Some of us are eaten up, and some of us grow wolves in our own bellies,
And some last long enough to meet our wolves down the line.
What does it matter if you become the wolf or not?
What narratives are left to us now?

My memories were located in a box
Just to the right of my dreams, nightmares
Playing out like half-improvised scripts in my head.
The memories were polite, always, just resting patiently in their places
Until you looked for them and they escaped out that hole in the bottom,
The ones the rats chewed last summer.
My brain is a well-mapped city.
My brain is half-destroyed.
The box of my dreams could never hold them all, so they littered
Waking hours with their eyes.
I expected it from them, but not memory, my polite and pleasant fellows,
My childhood friends. Loyalty is a short-lived ideal.
The boxes fell into each other.
I’m forgetting why I gave them different parcels of the brain in the first place.

They taught us in primary school to rhyme;
One million separate identities of the lovesick took it as an invitation.
You might think that’s a rebuke. It is not.
It is meant as an invitation. Every word, in weft and weave,
In wave and tide, in sigh and heave.
It calls for another to love us. It tells us to never love again.
At the first breath of rhyme in elementary-
Some nonsense about frogs and banks and water over our hands
We are hooked. We are starving. We are addicts.
We want to chime. We want to sing.
We want to love with words.

You want to make something beautiful.
You try on your many hats-
Can you make art that stirs hearts to syncopated fluid intake?
Can you sing songs that lift the diaphragm?
Can you move in a dance that will bring your audience’s tear ducts to full production?
But you are not good at those things.
And you are not patient- here’s where it gets difficult.
You are not patient, so you move on.
You pull more hats from the closet.
You want to make something beautiful, so you save lives
In safety features for automated factories,
In the stitch of a needle through shredded flesh,
In the measure of a brace in a new office building
But you are too good at those things.
You want to feel like you’ve made something beautiful
Not just looking back, but as you make it
The stroke of a brush forming the curve of a lover’s cheek
The curl of the final bracket in a series of nested loops
The flex of your shoulderblades and press into the pillows
Everyone wants to make something beautiful,
In blood, in sweat, in paint
In lyric and code, in ink and tears
They want to have made something extraordinary by the time they die
So they can say they did, so it wasn’t a waste, so it just
So it was, and is, and could be forever.

I want to tell you about compassion,
But I don’t have any.
I hear it’s about selflessness and sacrifice,
About feeling bad
About suffering and relief,
About making yourself feel better
Through helping others.

I want to tell you about love,
But I don’t have any.
I thought I might have, once, but I scared it off
I thought it was about smiles, laughter and hope
But I hear it’s about ***
About skin and narrowed eyes
About making yourself feel better
Through touching others.

I want to tell you about pain,
But I don’t have any.
At least I don’t anymore
Because they’ve taken care of that.
I hear they’ve got a lot of stuff
I hear it’s about hormones and habits
About vitamins and sadness
About making yourself feel better
Through chemicals.

I want to tell you about me,
But I don’t have any.
I was something, and now I’m not,
And I haven’t decided what I’ll be next.
I hear it’s about dreams,
About ambition and drive,
About what I want to do and how,
About making yourself feel better
Through limiting regrets.

I want to tell you about life,
But I don’t have any of that, either.
I hear it’s about being good and making choices
And having preferences in the first place.
About growing up
And growing in
About making yourself feel better
Through acting.

You possess an abrasive restlessness
Sandpaper on silk, it strains.
Near delirious in your self-destruction,
You writhe, and twist, and scratch

Your heart skips beats,
Stutters and clenches for days
Arteries scuffle beneath your skin
Fingers tremble and then they curl

My dear, you are the sunrise in the west
The moonrise into the eclipse
You bare your teeth in a crown of light
And you threaten the dark