"angel, come clean,"
the river whispers
as if i were not
already in love with it,
as if it did not
harmonize with
the sound of my
beating heart,
thump-thump-thumping
in ethereal cacophany

scarlet drips between my thighs
and off my wrists,
and when i sink beneath
an ocean of blue,
it runs red,
and
relief sprouts out
of lungs, finally, finally--

and then
i dream of
water rising
and collapsing
lungs,
all that breath swallowed up
like a siren song

heaven is a ***** liar
pleading for forgiveness;
the truth is buried
at the bottom of
a freshwater river
in the decaying hands of
a skeleton
who yearned for
eternal solace

stress blooming forward
in chest like
erratic butterflies flapping
away
and thoughts spiraling
down towards
my stomach where
they do not dissolve
in acid, no matter how
desperately
i ache for them
to leave me

times when
i think about my
future - they are not
etched in stone, they
are fleeting and temporary and as
miniscule as grains of sand

how could they be anything
more than dust
when the possibility
of any greatness
or worthiness
or meaning
is so
tiny, so
small
as to not
even
be there at all

fire and brimstone
and a grotesque attempt
at spontaneous combustion,
words crawling out of throats
and
hands, trembling
and
body, trembling, all over
and
sheer force of memory
splitting through rationality
until a bomb deteroriates
everything we used to
love,
including myself.

i can't help but bleed out the good in me

everything is meaningless and i
mean it. there's no point to this
there's no point to me there's no
point in existing other than to
breathe and love and make sense
of why we're here and
i'm sick of people telling me that the smart ones
are the sad ones
because i'm not smart,
i'm sick.
i'm vomiting up all the
feelings that are so overused
and overexaggerated that i cannot
tell what is normal or not
until someone informs me
that daydreaming
of slashing wrists and leaking
red when i
drop a glass of water
isn't normal. i used
to think everyone was
this way and i used to
think there'd be some
cure
to this, some magic pill
filled with stardust
and a tendency for
chemical codependency
that would make
me stop throwing up
all the feelings
bottled in the pit of
my stomach. (the
magic pill made me throw up,
just not the bad things. only
the good ones.) and
i can't stop thinking about
how everything is meaningless
and we are all here
and they are all there
and no one will ever
know one another completely
and that's not okay with me.
it's not.

don't tell me how to write poetry or how to write stories or how to write at all. don't tell me there's a rhyme or reason to this; don't tell me that i should be using iambic pentameter or separating each line into delicate sestets or  molding metaphors out of things that were never intended to be meaningful. don't tell me that there are rules i need to follow and that nothing i ever make will be precious and valuable and wholesome unless it conforms to the artistic, intellectual way of doing things because i am not artistic and i am not intellectual and i will write however i please because my writing is imbedded layers beneath my skin, so far down i could never tear it out in any way that wasn't raw or real or rustic. don't make those parts of me insincere simply to hold them to ideals set by different old writers in older times with different old feelings and dreams and beliefs than mine. don't tell me how to write. don't tell me how to not be me.

sometimes i feel
so much
i don't know
where
to put
it all
(is it supposed
to flow
out like a
river
or explode
out of my
mouth
or swallow
me
whole?)