When I was young
I didn't have any doctor bills
now I get statements
special delivery, envelopes
full of X-rays I hold up
to the moon, that rock
sinking deep in my gut
looking like all of those cold
feelings I've swallowed
the many curses held inside
wooden matches chewed twice
and not spat out, a cancer
like a two-headed speckled trout
swimming around
trying to find its way out
when in fact it's just a feeling
I get trying to swallow regrets
one rusty old fish hook at a time.

it's been a wild ride, one of those roller coasters that make you sick every time
but the thrill is worth the nights spent shivering over buckets at the edge of your bed
and you've given me more downward plunges than anyone has, anyone since her
but the crawl to the top was so slow that i thought i loved the drop more
i've always lived fast, too reckless, too uncaring of my own worth
and staring down into oblivion as it steamed and smoked was its own kind of drug;

as a kid i was scared of darkness but that ride made me feel alive
i just had to close my eyes when it got dark, but eventually i got so used to darkness
i didn't have to close my eyes at all, and it took me too long to realise
your drug was not a medicine, there were no doctors writing you down on a prescription
i picked you up from slumming with the wrong crowd and injected you into my veins
just like you tempted me to do so, and now i'm feeling low from living high

the cost of euphoria is way too much, and now i know i'm dying inside
it's in the unhealthy coping mechanisms and the days spent wasting away in bed,
the bruises under my eyes and the way i chew through half the fridge
then spend three days eating nothing but the grounds left at the bottom of a coffee mug
don't get me wrong, there were times where you and i were so, so good but the cost of
living high is a debt i'll be paying for the next twenty years of my life - if i survive that long

anxiety guillotine, hanging
from a thread, suspended above
my sunburnt neck. i'm utterly spent.
another day, back bent in the stocks,
latched in for the Kafka-esque:

carnivalesque body-horror.
shovel white-hot daggers
beneath finger-nail keratin.
bite my tongue off with police-tape teeth.
sadist, savor my godless screams.

drawn and quartered. send my limbs
to the map's furthest corners.
horseflies' aborted eggs
nest amidst maggot-infested
intestines, dangerously dangling.

turn my frown upside down.
stick a razor-blade
in my mouth
and pull 'till i grin
like chelsea.

interned within an unmarked grave,
save for the cairn made from the same stones
i flung myself upon from a great height. a wave
dashed against the rocks, endlessly rebuffed—
the sea's clairvoyance couldn't budge the boulder.