the worst part of hating you
is how i know that i don't
not really, not truly.
only in moments,
a kind of hatred matched
only by senseless love

hatred inspired by anger
and pain, and
“******* for making me feel like this,
for making me feel this way,
making me feel so deeply—
for making me feel at all.
for making me feel. period.
*******”

i don't like feelings,
and, sometimes, i don't like you
though i will always love you
and that's the truth
so ******* it, *******

you hollowed me out
like a bongo drum
then hit me 'til your hands
were the only things i recognised
and filled me with the sound of you
and gave me a heartbeat
painful and stuttering

i lost my rhythm,
getting lost in you.
so i hate you, i swear i do
but i just can't hate you
as much as i love you
and that's the grinding truth

i am hurt
beyond reason,
wounded
so messily
that the scars will
never heal.

but oh, i will remain so
long as the sun
greets me—
at least in passing.

i will grieve for
sun-kissed skin
that used to be mine.
i will layer up and hide
the deathly pallor
of flesh and bones and misery

our circumstance
dictates our paths
and the sun's shine
has me swallowing my complaints,
and thus:
“whether it hurts is kind of irrelevant”

yet i'm hurting all the same

i am having the same old conversations
with the stars up in the sky;
supine, i ask them how much
of their beauty lingers within me
not much, i think.
silently, they stare back, blinking dazedly

i think i might just sleep now,
and let them blanket my dreams:
cold and dead and burning out, alas, like me
but still shining just enough
to soften the blow of nightmares

i had an epiphany;
you are ethereal,
an ephemeral epoch
within my existence.

i shook hands with my priest and he told me god would listen to me
after years of talking to myself, i gave up
if this is the result of a benevolent lord, i want no part in such cruelty
every day spent suffering in this godless existence is another flirtation with the devil's temptations;
he hands me independence and assurance that this universe has no explanations
and in exchange i lose the love i might've had for myself
for a god or for life or for anyone

it's not that i need a god to explain it or to comfort me
it's that they lied when they told me a ghost was worth devoting my life to

too sickly an idea, to age beyond activity;
what allure can be founded in limitations?
this flirtation we have, as naïve kids, with growing up too fast
for the fear of missing out on all the fun of adulthood, of decision making
not understanding the freedom to be found in permitted passivity

before realising that brittle bones and looser skin,
and wrinkled eyes, and sunken cheeks,
the vanity within that corrodes self-esteem for every grey hair found,
is something we are far more comfortable seeing
in anybody that isn't ourselves

day and night melt into each other, and with them my muse
time becomes senseless, sense timeless, an endless scene,
sadness burns away, a wisp of smoke curling like the old telephone wire of my childhood home
but there's no connection: it disappears. and yet, it is still here
though intangible to me now, and thus i've lost my grip on things i thought i knew
nobody told me what i'd be losing once sadness loosened her hold,

my weakened clasp on creativity is a noose around my throat
i believed them when they said that art was born of pain,
i just didn't know how much of my own designs were intricately weaved
with misery, sprinkled with distress and agony
and it's not as though they left me, but they rolled to the far side of the bed
there's a gap i can't bridge, where something should be but instead nothing is

the realisation of your own dependency on despondency
is almost as gutting as the feeling in the first place.
depression's numb spells are a relief, until you start to notice what's missing.