I sat on the edge of the bed.
You smiled.
I am your daughter,
But words mean to you
Something else.

I took your hand,
Telling you I haven’t slept for a year.
I write reflections,
Tame the voices behind my left ear,
Assemble thoughts about the darkness.

I pour a warm, salty liquid
That burns the skin – it doesn’t moisturize.
It helps me,
This pseudo-therapy.
I hide behind my nickname,
So that no one holds me accountable
For what I’m supposed to be.

You also sat up at night,
You read books.
You carried hidden sadness,
I stick a smile on my lips.

I hug people who carry Egregores.
You and I,
we are not afraid of the night.
Your hand is cold.
You smile,
You put together syllables into strange words.

You know that I matter to you.
I pretend to understand
What you wanted to say.

In a moment, it will get hard.
You’ll start screaming like a little boy,
Or again you’ll wait
Until this state of life passes you.

Life?
It’s a kind of space
Where people, because of fear
Bite and scratch
Like frightened, rabid dogs –
And then soothe it
With controlled tenderness.

I sit with you on the edge of the couch
And I think:
We write with the left hand.
We are beings of the night.
Our path was shared –
In fear, to protect a small piece of “I”.

I fear I’ll lose language.
I desperately defend myself against silence.
I dream of non-human languages.
I write words as if I wanted
To cast spells on reality –
Still, it’s not enough.
The anesthesia stopped working.

One day, this will be the end,
Yet as long as I live,
I’ll be the naive one.
That’s what I want.

I choose sweet, sugar-coated hope,
With pink sprinkles,
Telling myself that he, she
Didn’t mean to trample –
Only life pushed them
Into that dark corridor.

My hope
Is not a soft blanket,
This is a heavy, tight helmet.

Poets are glowsticks,
snapped,
then they fluoresce.

Liquid light.
Blood of the lightning bug,
squashed and smeared.
Nearly extinct.

Bleed and glow.

The cuts of forever promised,
instead,
they siphoned.

Distilled into purple-red neon,
spelling out:

read me.
know I’ve lost.

A cognitive shift
Seeing the reality.
A state of awe
With transcendent quality.

When hit by the truth -
An overwhelming emotion.
Appreciation of beauty,
Increased sense of connection.

Shift in self-concept,
It could be transformative.
Sense of fragility
From a different perspective.

That girl in my dream
She has no face - it seems.
No, it's not like that.
Wearing a beautiful dress,
Neither is she faceless,
Nor is she voiceless.
But as soon as I wake up
Her face escapes the walls of my brain,
And her voice flows out like a flowing river,
Every second getting dimmer.
Yet I remember
How beautiful she is,
And how her voice lingers in my heart
Like a true piece of art.
It's like something I know,
But at the same time - don't know.

Not a dystopian world we are living in.
That's just our imagination and way of thinking.
If the world were dystopian,
We would have been dreaming of utopia to live in.

I share a narrow window with the seagulls
I don't know if for them air is a magic fluid
for me it is a canvas waiting to be filled
the coal of time is burning our breath
away

The efficiency room days were
the worst and the best.
Broke and bent,
sick and deranged.
Disheveled dreams, like
horses with broken legs.

There was an occasional
miracle.
A forgotten five-dollar
bill crumpled in the
front pocket of some *****
jeans, lying by the fake
plant and a copy of Hamsun's
Hunger, long overdue from
the library.
The fiver would buy a
pint of cheap *****.
My nerves settled for a
moment.

Friends seem to drift
away by the month.

"Where's Johnny?"

"He froze down at the Raccoon River."

"Oh ****, he was always good for a snort."

"Have you seen Sue lately?"

"The cirrhosis finally took her."

"*******, I used to get drunk and
tell her I loved her, while she gave me head."

Poverty and death drank with us in
those cheap rooms,
Singing sad songs and songs
of victory.
Battles were won and lost
and great debates waged in our
addled minds.
We took care of each other the best
we knew how.
Life was just a myth.