There is a period of time
Immediately proceeding a conversation you had
Where you shared, what you are sure in retrospect,
Was too much

And when they go its nearly silent
Aside from the car engine
Your ears are on fire
On one hand you’re glad you said it
On the other hand
You wish to rewind
And unsay the things you did.
Reverse and greedily fill your arms with all the
Pieces of yourself you’d given away freely.
They’re yours and they don’t own them.
But like a dusty collection of spoons,
From all fifty states,
You know that you have no use
Harboring those thoughts.

Maybe they will somehow affect that person
And help them when they’re feeling down
But you doubt it.
They won’t fully understand,
Because you’re a bad story teller
Who can’t describe the feeling of the sun
On the tops of your legs and interpolated
Between your toes.
And you're selfish and don’t care
You feel incomplete now and hope
That maybe, just maybe
They weren’t even listening to you ramble
Or couldn’t understand you
Or cast the little wads of memories away
Like pencil shavings
Which are fun for a little under an hour.

And you’ve almost convinced yourself
Until you see them, and they see you
And open their mouth to say something-
And like some horror movie
The secrets come swarming.

That
I have not written anything worth two *****
since We were together

Although I do not remember
any of our conversations
I do
Remember every place we had them
and the feelings that
ran wild through my
innocent body.

It occurred to me
that
this poem
would be pointless to write
and worthless to read.

As I brush my teeth in the bathroom, a young woman enters- tooth brush and face wash in hand.  I watch her reflection in the large mirror a front the sinks, I put an over-sized glob of tooth paste on my brush.
******* it Danielle, she sees this mistake you’ve made.

I turn the water on and attempt to wash away some of the toothpaste. We start brush at the same time, I smile to myself because these synchronized flukes, such as speaking in unison or laughing simultaneously, make me feel briefly connected to someone. Sounds a little silly, but don’t all ways of relieving loneliness?

My anxiety stirs again as I realize the volume of bristle to tooth.* Can you hear this? Is is disgusting to you? That sound of saliva and paste being ground into my teeth.
I lean forward to spit, inspecting the rusted faucet. I see my face in it’s metal stem, it convoluted my face.

I’d rather be disfigured, so that I’d no longer have to guess and worry about whether people were eying me. I would know. They could clearly see my faults if I had a missing jaw, drooping eye and liver spots mapped across my grey skin. I wouldn’t have to worry about the possibility of being seen in a favorable light.

The possibility of fooling anybody into thinking I’m not repulsive. I would know it.  I stare into the metal, I spit. Blood is all over the sink. I spit again and more blood. Again, blood. It’s pouring out of my mouth. I turn the water on high, panicked that the girl beside me will see. But she leaves, “goodnight” she says as she walks by. I try to say something but I’m choking on the blood. Where the **** is this blood coming from?

I glance up to the mirror, there is no blood in my mouth. Back to the sick- no blood. I am so confused, just moments ago Armageddon was spilling from my mouth; and now it’s vanished?
I stumble back wards into a stall.

“I saw that.”

A voice whispers from within the stall, or was it outside?   I open the door, but nobody is there.
Okay, Danny, calm down. Nobody is here, you’re imagining things.

“No, you heard.”

Confused, the voice, that voice- it’s coming from the stall door. No, doors can’t speak, I open the door but still, I am alone.

I run, bladder still full. Sundries still on the counter, I need to get out of there.
_______________________________
Paranoid Schizophrenia- A mental disorder characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking, and it is accompanied by significant social or occupational dysfunction.*
___________

Within two weeks of my first experience of hallucinations, I was in the Summit Valley Institution for Mental Disorders. Highly medicated, with stitches along my chin and staples in my head.
I’d lost all control, they found me at the bottom of a stairwell after falling 3 stories.

Nurses told me that when I’d been taken in, they found more that one hundred scraps of paper in my pockets, on them were different snipets of conversation I’d heard throughout the day. It was a compulsion, I was told, associated with Schizophrenia.