I'm not very important
I'm easy to forget
Like that pain in your heart
That goes numb and then black

Don't remember me
I'm just a passing shadow
Like a solar eclipse
I'm destined for the gallows

Everyone talks about depression as if they know it.  
But what they don’t know
is that depression is a hooded figure standing just outside of a wooden doorway,
it’s feeling the blood dripping down your skin and having the sick thought of
“Oh, look how beautiful the red is”
Depression is lying on your bed for hours on end,
salt tracks lining your face like the scars on your ankles,
staring at your ceiling
tracing patterns in the paint and accepting death in life with this hole in your chest
because death is a reward,
an escape from this pain you deserve to feel.
Depression is writing sick poetry on skin and publishing it with scars,
cutting on ankles,
not wrists
because you’re scared you’ll get in trouble
but you so desperately need to be seen,
and never are.
Depression is writing the word “alone”
and seeing the word
“home”,
accepting the pain like a gift because you deserve it.
Depression is admitting suicidal thoughts to paper and not to people,
and loving the broken things,
hoping to tie them together,
thinking maybe things will get better,
but knowing that’s just wishful thinking.
Depression is hearing your mother call you monster and disgusting
through the too-thin walls of your door
when she thinks you can’t hear,
and then telling you to your face that you have no right to cry,
as if sadness is a privilege and you’re so pathetic that you don’t deserve it.
Depression is shutting yourself up in your room
and hearing your family laughing downstairs
because you feel like you can’t be a part of them
and learning at a young age to love family always
but that family isn’t always love
Depression is wanting to take
love and your heart
and break them into tiny little pieces and throw them into waves,
to throw them away
Depression is a foot when the shoe hasn’t been broken in yet,
is when you haven’t broken life in,
is seeing happy people and thinking they all look the same,
like the front covers of magazines
with smiles reaching their eyes when yours can’t.
Depression is wishing you could package your smiles
into tiny little piles and hand them to people more deserving of them
because you know you’re wasting them with half-assed lines of
“I’m fine.”
Depression is having to view your past
as if it wasn’t yours.
Depression is a hooded figure standing just outside
of a wooden doorway
and when you close the door out of fear
it keeps pounding,
possessive,
******,
and when you open the door out of anger you shout,
“I’M SCARED”
to thin air
but your voice comes out as a whisper.

At my feet are strewn the boxes,
filled and unfilled, waiting
for their cargo to be packed down,
the coarse rustle of newspaper
helps to drown the sounds
of my beleaguered thoughts.

These lingering thoughts
mate with memories in my boxes,
but soon the sounds
are filed away, and I’m waiting
for the next newspaper
to cover them, push them down.

Here it says a dog was put down
after running away from... my thoughts
are arguing again, the newspaper
tries me keep going with my boxes.
Don’t keep her waiting,
she gets like this, the huffing sounds,

her impatient, ruffled countenance sounds
an alarm, keep my head down,
but I can’t carry on waiting
for a place to settle my thoughts,
it’s nothing but boxes
for me, one for every newspaper.

Sometimes I feel like a newspaper,
scattered, and full of the sounds
and lives of many places, in long
rectangular boxes
on page two, continued on page four, no one point
to nail me down,
I’m lost until I find my own, thoughts
will get me nowhere, stop waiting.

But she’s been forever waiting
on me, I am her only news, paper-
less and live, her thoughts
are always with me.
In her every promise, the sounds
of beginnings and settling down,
traveling with me and my boxes.

Every newspaper-sheathed move, sounds
of uprooting, thoughts of stripping down,
she keeps it waiting in boxes.

-*BRD