my fingers stutter shattered sentences
when i'm like this. when i'm like this,
i'm shrink plastic and the world is an oven; or –
when i'm like this, i'm every unsatisfying
leaf that never crunched underfoot. i'm the spitting
shivering underdog who never made it out of the gate.
i'm pluto between the years 2006 and the end of the world.
when i'm like this, the world is like that,
meaning that the world is my childhood. the world
is the bloated feeling of a stomach full of lukewarm tap water.
the world is a surprise party wrapped up straitjacket-tight
and just a day too early.

when i'm like this, i'm always stepping on the cracks
in the pavement. the cracks, the world says, will open up
and swallow me into the belly of the beast.

it's 8pm on a tuesday night and i'm drinking beer in the shower.
it's an art form, holding the thin neck like a perfect knot,
my fingers rough rope against the grit of the glass. i think of sea salt
and fishermen, and weaving upon weaving. my hands are not rough
in the way that fishermen's hands are rough. i bite the skin
around my nails and on the top of my fingers, and the water seeps
into the gaps and they bulge, like some percy shelley-esque bloated,
dead body.

it's just one beer, i tell myself, and i'm not drinking it to get drunk. no,
if i wanted to get drunk i'd have brought the bourbon or the wine
in here with me. i think my mouth just wants something to do other than beg. i kiss the lip and wonder how hard i would have to bite to see what shatters first; red blood on brown glass on rainwater-not-rainwater.

it's not just me in the house. i cried loudly before i slept last night, at five or six or whatever in the morning, and now the house has been christened with a ghost-echo that will die longer than it lived, far longer than my short, one year tenure in these rented student walls.
the others (who, might i say, are handling this whole mess of being alive with far more optimism and birthday cake than i am) are in the kitchen,
doing something with the tap. turning it off and on.
i don't think they mean for the shower to hum alongside,
my passivity the canvas for another action, and it's not like –
it's not like i mind. no, it's not like i mind.
the water is powerful, hot, then cool and slow, like rain instead of thunder, but my back is just my back.
which is to say, of course, that i'm not in here to get clean.
if i was in here to get clean, i wouldn't have brought that beer in with me.

but i digress:
i've been staring at the shampoo bottle for a while now
and my eyes have unfocused. of course. i might be the wrong way round
but i'm not stupid enough to wear my glasses in the shower.
the words are fuzzy but i can tell it's the special shampoo i bought
for when i bleached my hair in this same, small bathroom (when i tried to reclaim
a story that i'm never going to finish writing. about fishermen and people with teal hair and a hero who gets a hero's ending).
my hair is dark brown now, all over.
brown hair on brown glass on murky brown beer.
i'm supposed to think of a statement to leave you thinking about this,
about me,
but i haven't finished writing it yet.

putting an ending on something in progress feels too much like suicide.

The hands that are locked inside my body
pull at my ribcage. We'll make you an angel,
they say, but that means
tearing my flesh apart. I beg them –
please, take my brain,
pull it and mould it and set it on fire.
The brain is too precious, they spit,
and I want to die. I want to die
to make myself something else. Something...
palatable. Something that I can chew
and swallow all at once.

Instead, they bite. God, they sink
their seraphim teeth into the flesh
that I call myself. And they digest.

And what of the brain?
Alive, immobile, it waits.
In pain, it waits. Screams.
Begs for release.
But these angels are not from Heaven,
nor do they caress broken bones
once they have devoured.