stage 1 of therapy and i have not
made progress. the whispers
stalk me through the battlegrounds
of school corridors - "she tried
to off herself with anxiety pills and left
no letter full of blood"- there's
no part of me left to imagine.
why are my secrets never my own? do
they not belong to me, do they
not belong to me, do i
not belong to me?

stage 2 of therapy and i
am still so terrified
of funerals
and of coffins
and of suicide notes
and i
am so horrified that my heart is drowning
my body is bleeding i won't admit
this pains me so much and i must've
loved everyone so hard, so deeply
there's nothing left to share
this hurts so
this hurts so
this hurts so bad
the repetition is crushing my skull.

stage 3 of therapy and i am
not dead. i am not dead.
i am not dead. i think i'm
losing my sense of self and
everything lacks meaning
and i am dying
and the breath is struggling
and the lungs are struggling
and everything is struggling
and i am dying.
but i am not dead.

stage 4 of therapy and i haven't yet
shot down the parts of myself
attempting to strangle the blood
straight out of me
but i haven't shot myself, either.
which is progress.
progress.
little
by little
progress, a word which i have never
yet delighted in the pleasures of feeling.
progress.

my knuckles cracked on solid concrete
and i swear
i shattered every bone in my body
one by one, crunching and
crackling and crying -
pause.
wait.
let me reiterate:
how dare you say
you miss me
when you stare
at me with eyes colder than the frozen tundra
accumulating along the walls of your arteries,
when i'm breaking my hands
over you using yours to
hold another's,
when you stare at me
like you never knew me at all
when you stare
at me as if
i'm dying, as if i'm
crumbling into dirt and dust and ruin
before you
but there's a question
which goes up in flames
each time i glance back
at you -
does love ever die?
and if so,
when will i?

it's okay to be sad.
it's just not okay to stay that way.

i think my eyes were blue
before he thieved the colour
from the insides of me

everything is strange and eerily quiet
and i am not allowed the delicacy
of feeling sad
and i am not allowed
to feel anything
i am hiding bad habits underneath
makeup and there are blooming
bruises on my arms and
she is so beautiful but she's dousing me in kerosene
nights and lighting matches for her cigarettes on top of me
but i - i - i am not allowed to feel this
i am not allowed to feel this
sixteen years is not enough, it's
never going to enough, i am
never going to be
enough

there's no relief in death
but there's some sweet ecstasy within it
which i've been literally dying to try.

all my love's going to drown.

someone asked me over the phone
if i wanted to **** myself and i
regurgitated every pitiable
answer you'd expect to discern from
the most normal of people and a few years
ago i never would've lied but acting
is a state of mind as opposed to a
state of art and it's so necessary for me
because someone asked
me over the phone if i wanted
to **** myself and the truth
was so difficult to handle
that i bled black blood from
the wound in my mouth, the
hole had been singed there
when i began feeling
like the knife lodged in
my stomach wasn't nearly
enough pain yet when do we
begin to enjoy the euphoric
disasters of adventures
with a warning sign shrieking
out: DANGER DEATH AHEAD
when do we stop crying when
we take too many pills when
do we stop praying to a god
who never loved us in the
first place when does
our innocence rust from
its original golden surface but
there isn't an answer to that
rambling of a sentence i'm afraid
and the dark rainclouds moving
in the distance have thunder resounding
in my headaches and getting
closer by the hour and i want
to cry, i used to be so much
sweeter than this but someone
asked me over the phone if
i wanted to **** myself

and i lied
because i did.