God stares at the lamb nailed to our door like an art exhibit.

Stroking his chin. Nodding. Moving to the next.



Let me gag on dirt you dug up from an old grave,

eyes full of re-purposed blood

and smiling like a thief hearing sirens drive off in the wrong direction

Let me fall like the statue of an overthrown dictator,

the people innately understanding that they are witnessing

the dawn of a new holiday

as my row of crooked teeth gets straightened by the concrete



I am writhing on the ground

and a crowd is gathering

and I tell them that everything is fine

and they don’t believe me

but they don’t do anything to stop me either



I want to chain every bit of decay in me

to a television tuned to static

and stand up from my foxhole.

I want a dead raven nailed through my heart.

I want the world to wipe the sweat from its brow

and put me back where I belong.



Just get on with it.

Stop putting it off.

Finally and forever buried under all the dust I’ve been gathering.

Last week my History professor was talking about British Imperialism in India

while I was busy watching a row of ants

make their way from the trash can to

a hole in the wall,

and I mentally checked in just in time to hear him say,

“If you don’t believe the future will be any better, what’s the point of living?”

and I wanted to laugh at the top of my lungs,

but I just kept taking notes



Last night

I downed three times the recommended dosage of sleeping pills with beer,

which is obviously really bad for you,

but obviously not bad enough,

because I still woke up



I got you Anne Sexton for your birthday because I love her,

but also because I have a real affinity for writers who killed themselves,

because I feel like they’re doing laps around the pool

while I’m still looking down from the diving board

I tell you I'm going to write something drunk,
but it's past midnight and the pen is still of ink
despite being more than a handful of shots in
and staring at a page for what seemed like ten whole minutes
but was probably more like two

I text you saying this
and I'm probably a lot more disappointed than you are
because for me the whole conceit
is that I would inevitably write something about you,
and anything about you would probably be closer to genius
than to garbage

I'm not sure what I thought you would say,
it was really more of an offhand comment
to keep the conversation going because
we are both drunk and we are both alone
but what you say, in that sort of ironic deadpan
that only a text without punctuation can convey is,
"You've written these texts"

I say (because I really am, in an idiotic smile way),
"Mind blown"
and you say,
"Write about that"
and I say,
"I will"

Because I'm just in control of my faculties enough
to have the small revelation
that the line between what I write down and what I say to people
is totally arbitrary and self imposed -
not anymore arbitrary than anything else I guess
but that's not the point

One of these days

I’m going to get tired of

trying to think of clever ways to say that

I want to **** myself

and just **** myself



I’m scared about telling my psychiatrist

that I want to up the dosage on my Prozac

because even though it’s true I don’t know

if I can be emotive enough to convince her

that it’s necessary, that I can feel in my chest

the urge to empty a pill bottle into my mouth

one at a time, and that I’m so sick of looking

at oncoming traffic so tenderly -

I have this horrible image of her letting me down easy,

telling me to get more sleep and work on my diet



But if that happens my ace in the hole is telling her

that now that I’m living by myself

I have a lot more freedom to act out

on my constant suicidal fantasies,

because there is no one for a hundred miles

whose potential sadness is enough to stop me

from seeing myself out



Telling her that the first time I got drunk

I finally realized that I have the opportunity

to externalize my wanton desire for self destruction,

and that I don’t have to try and hide my notebooks

full of sentences like

“Suicide is the most rational action available to us as human beings,”

and I can tell my friends that I want to **** myself

without having to whisper



I’m laughably resentful of the people I love

and more importantly the people that I think love me

because I feel like they’ve nailed my feet to the ground,

and I literally cannot even imagine my mother’s reaction

on hearing that I died on a hospital bed of an overdose

or that I jumped off the parking garage near my dorm

or that I blew my brains out and the lifeless mound of flesh

that was her son

didn’t even have the decency to tell her goodbye

It’s raining really hard here

because of course it is



I watch The Office to try and cheer myself up

but it’s Season Two where Jim is in unrequited love with Pam

and this predictably makes me feel really bad,

bad enough to prematurely spur on my already planned trip to the store

for beer and razor blades,

the beer because I’m out and

the razor blades because I found out that my pocket knife is pretty dull



I have Miranda July’s short story collection sitting on my shelf,

I got it for you a while ago

and I was planning on giving it to you for Valentine’s,

but I guess now it’s just going to stay on my shelf

and I’ll have two copies of it,

which is really embarrassing

in such an insufferably direct and human way

that it can’t be enhanced by metaphor -

I’ll probably end up giving it to you anyway

because I’m sure you’ll like it

even divorced from its context as a romantic gesture



I’m pulling the nausea inducing maneuver

of sending drunk videos to all my friends,

alternating between complaining and singing

and through an absolutely incredible display of willpower

I resist the urge to send you one,

mostly because I’m pretty sure that

you’re doing totally fine without me

and a drunk video

would be correctly construed as childish and attention seeking,

eliciting an eye-roll at best

and a complete loss of respect

and the chance that you’ll talk to me again at worst



You’re probably out having fun with your friends

because you actually have friends -

the closest thing I have to a friend here left unannounced for the weekend,

and in the kitchen I can hear one of my roommates

stop in the middle of a story about dancing with some girl at a party last night

just long enough to answer a call from his girlfriend,

and I can’t stand being anywhere in the world,

especially not here in my closet of a dorm room



I cut from the outside in,

getting steadily closer and closer to the vein,

like an unsure child afraid to jump into its parents’ arms,

so that by the time I’m finished

it looks like I’ve been keeping track of the days on my wrist



I’m listening to Johnny Foreigner while lying on my floor

and I sing along really loud to the start of Champagne Girls I Have Known,

“She says it’s written in the stars but I don’t look at the stars anymore -

I just want someone to die for”

and that brings my roommate to my door,

he knocks and asks if I’m alright

and I get up and answer the door without thinking,

he sees the blood all over my shirt and the bandages on my wrist

and says “What the ****, dude, are you ok?”

and I say “Yeah, I just fell,”

and I can tell immediately that he doesn’t buy it,

because why would he,

but I cut him off before he can say anything else and

tell him to take a picture of me,

so he does and then leaves me alone again

after taking away my empty gin bottle,

and I still have the picture on my phone,

me slumped in my chair with a barely mustered smile,

I debate all night about whether or not to post it to Facebook so you can see it,

but ultimately decide that it would be too desperate and juvenile even for me



I’m texting Amanda, not because we’re even that close,

because we’re not,

but because she’s the only person

I’m more than fifty percent sure won’t tell anyone

about me flailing around my room

and openly crying about you,

and, trying to be nice, she says,

“She doesn’t even know what she lost,”

I want to sort of scoff at this,

but I just say “A boring *******,”

and she says

“You’re not boring, but you are sometimes an *******

(and I say that in the most loving way possible, haha)”

she asks me if I’ve ever thought of getting help

and after I finish laughing

I tell her that I’m gonna get my psychiatrist to up my dosage,

and she says, “Is that a good idea with how much you drink?”

and I say “No, technically I guess not, but neither is drinking at all,”

and she says “Okay, just making sure.”



I wake up to a bunch of texts from my friends

because apparently they got worried

when all my Snapchat videos of me drunkenly singing

with blood all over my shirt

also contained the obligatory mumbling of

“I wanna **** myself so ******* bad.”

Mike asks if I’m still alive

and I say yes, unfortunately,

and he says, cool beans.

That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about when I say

it’s really hard for me to be at all honest or immediate,

not that I necessarily wanted him to be all, you know,

“Please be careful because you’re my friend and I care about you,

if you need to talk just let me know,”

or something like that,

because that would have felt really uncomfortable and disingenuous

considering our friendship,

but I don’t know, I’d just like to be able to earnestly express myself

in a real, physical scenario without cringing about it forever



Basically all I accomplish all weekend

is spending my last ten dollars on alcohol and drinking all of it the same night,

so now I am literally broke and also

literally out of alcohol,

but I’m sure it will be fine because

nothing bad has ever happened as a result

of my being alone with my thoughts for an extended period of time



I told myself that I wouldn’t write any poems about this,

but my sentimentality got me here

and there’s a comically slim chance that it could get me out

It was there, I at the sea and you in the mountains, each of us looking up and loathing the same sky, our heartbeats dissolving like runaway trains in the distance en route to unknown destinations that we wondered why, if moments like this were possible (as apparently they were), they should be doled out to us so infrequently as to threaten our belief in them entirely.