For some reason I can only write the brick walls around me,
Write until I've caged myself into my fear or the bleak tone maneuvering outside of my body.

I feel ghosts embrace me like they're waiting for my soul to depart.

But in me somewhere is a golden aura,
Gilded and tinged, sun soaked with hope.

Lost maybe in the past, drowning in spirits reliving old memories for fun.

I'd like to find my way there again, back to the days when poetry was a path to the world I could never know,

to the mysteries of the cosmos waiting just beyond my pen.

Listening to hope sing a birdsong,
A tune from a creature that just escaped their cage.

I want to line my insides with stars and bleed the firmament onto hot concrete,
watch God angry as I give heaven to everyone.

But there is no peace in my body that wants for hope.

None that I've been able to find lately. None that has existed on its own.

I wonder if I can breathe this into existence,
make my words match the future I want and not the one I feel coming.

I wonder if it's possible to be a beacon without light,
to be the sun without heat.

To create hope from despair,
and happiness from misery.

I suppose it doesn't matter.
I'll find a way.

Oh I hear it

Grumbled,
Slurring,
and mad at its own decisions.

I hear it. I couldn't possibly miss it, that voice is yours. In those moments when I feel abhorrence and abjection,

It's YOU

Reminding me of the pillars I stand on that grate against the sky and
How far the fall is if I take one wrong step.

You don't shy away from my failure or the shame you feel in me,

I feel in me.

Yet somehow,
when the night
has become dew drops over me,

The voice is different. It is me, maybe.

Is that normal? To hate yourself so much you've forgotten what your own voice sounds like.

All I can hear is a high pitched whine most days.
The rest,
it's you.

I know you're thinking I'm wrong,
But I hear it…

It's you,
Dad.

Let their voices pour in,
they are tired whispful woahs
celebrating the long torment of strife forgotten.
I am

nothing but a door of the flood gate,
A lost soul mistaken for a whisper.
I am here to find solace in the yearning for more.

I am

In between the circuitry,
riding the signals toward resolution but
I am

Incomplete.

So I must be part of them all

I must be the voices and the path away from the dread that comes
I must be an empty echo of the machine,
a stuck cog crushing a dead rat.

We are the squeal of something dying,
something we've been waiting to fall,
never realizing it was us.

Down the cliff we tumble,
to another door waiting to be opened.

To another body standing at the gate.
Whispers lost on the line.

Yet I hear now the shout from the other side
as the doors swing like hanged corpses,
wood splintering at their hinges.

"Let the voices pour in."

I am the aching lumber of sore lungs
A thick sigh in the winter,
steam evaporating like thoughts of the future

Putrid and petrified,
I am the past
I am the burdened creak of knocking knees

A ghost tied to a present that will not pass
looking over for
answers from the morning star

I am the Iris wide with sun
Light gleaming glossy
off the burnt orange horizon where
God finds me buried
above the mountain

I've got lingering memories from the earliest days of my life.

Just a short few. Involving sloppy joes, Sonic the hedgehog, almost drowning in a pool. Probably a few of the better ones.

Saturday morning cartoons watching angry beavers with my sisters. Being with my mom. My sister taking me for adventures.

The good ones are far and few between though. These all come from this short period in my life when I was about three, and I stop remembering anything from then after I turn five.

But the rest of the memories are hard to talk about.

A man who used to ****** my sister's. **** them. Who used to torture us when he wasn't dealing it out to one of us by ourselves. A man killing himself by jumping off the roof of our apartment complex. Probably more that I can't get to.

Then I remember...very suddenly...I don't even remember everything leading up to it...these memories are so fractured and broken, my dad coming to pick me up in the middle of the night doesn't even make sense anymore.

That's not new though

That's science.

That's memory. Trauma. The brain deciding it can't handle all the input and closing things off. To make it easier to exist.

I've never understood that. The brain closing off abandoned hallways, refusing to let me access things that could make me shut everything down.

If we acted in exact patterns with our brain, and we were more connected to the parts of our minds we have no control over, I would feel less like I am a stranger in my body.

Inside of me is a computer, in all of us, that acts without our foresight.
That exists within us making choices and decisions that we have absolutely no say in.

That protects itself from what I might do if I knew everything, felt everything.

So when I try to think back on Danny making us duct tape mummies and refusing to let us breathe, my brain skips from that to my mom in the kitchen. From there to a neighbor's apartment playing video games and eating food we didn't have at our home.

Then that jumps to a day at the pool and that jumps to me in it.

From there to me drowning. Accepting I would die at four or five.

Then a body ripping me from the pool and me coughing out all of the water id just let in because I couldn't hold my breath any longer.

From there to the police lights flashing. My mom forcing us to stay inside so we wouldn't see the man's body on the floor.

And then it all sort of...fizzes out. I just remember driving to Kansas City with my dad and my stepmom.

Leaving my family. My sister's. And...I don't even really know why.

Because my brain won't let me remember what happened the night I left.

I don't fault it though.

Im sure my brain is right.
I'd have killed myself a long time ago if I could remember everything.

I mean, this poem is only two years of my 27.

And even then only two of my first five.

The next dose is waiting.
Each day I pop open the cap
I get flashes of a life I lived before prescriptions told me to stop crushing my drugs into easy to snort powder.

No ground down
parachute, no
more credit cards
lining up fine particulates in pretty rows to share with people who only want a quick buzz.

The glory is lost

I miss that instantaneous
transfer of sensation
as the substance
makes its way into my dull aches and my sharp pains, peers into echo chambers in my mind. Calcifying my emotions into easy to chip away chunks.

Forgetting how sobriety meets the calcification like the Titanic meets an iceberg.

I'm sinking fast as I
scramble to my contacts,
trying desperately to
buy just
one

more

hit.

I remember digging pieces of xanax from the carpet,
the pieces that got away the first time,
little nuggets of gold for us to mine that flicked themselves away when we tried to break them down the night before.

I remember these days vividly. I don't feel shame in the memory,
as I pop the cap back onto the bottle of my medication, I can only really feel longing.

Maybe the addict in me
just doesn't want to let go of something that felt so good.
Maybe addiction is just one of the few things passed down to me that I'll never be able to throw away.

Maybe I just need to take my meds and get out of the bathroom.