You know what it's like to sleep beside me
And wake up to my morning breath, you know
What it's like to sink yourself into my depths,
Together
You and I know everything.

A woman once told me
I was an open book with tattered pages and
I do not think I can agree with this, but
Whatever kind of book I am, you
Have taken the time to learn me
And sift through every page
Marking and highlighting
Your favorite passages
With your clay-stained, summer hands.

You have seen the rivers of light run through my eyes
And you know that I grew up without a family, live without a home, and
While you understand these things you also know
That they are not why my love for you
Is so strong, and I cannot thank you enough
For knowing that.

When your hands meet my flesh, they are not surprised that it is startled by itself
And take the time to soothe
The fearful currents running through it
Back to sleep.

When your eyes meet mine, I'm reminded that
I have never felt so familiar
In another person's gaze.

You ground me, rescue me from chaos on occasion by reminding me
That it is never too late to be new-

And I ought to slow down my hurtling mind
More often than I do
To tell you this,
And write to thank you.

This OCD means
I scrape at my scalp with this dusty razor
until only raw skin is left.

This depression means
I call on my mother
to re-open old wounds
and spill blood for me.

This anxiety means
I read her old love poems,
scared of whomever received them.

This dysphoria means
I have frequent nightmares
and wake up clutching my head,
making sure
that my hair is still short

and I dream, sometimes
of using a saw
to hack off my *******-

This dopamine means
I feel all of you
and see all of me
like nobody else.

When you touch me
sometimes time stands still
and sometimes it rushes.

I often can't tell
which is which.

You're either electrifying me
or cooling me down,
or both (?)

Flip my switches,
peel back my hardened layers
to see how the pistons
move inside me

the impetuous blood
streaming through my veins

See, taste, take all you want
from my slim pickings,
unraveled from crowds before you,

but still, they're there.

And though I don't have much to offer,
I'd love to offer it to you.

Mozart,
deaf,
died, eventually.

Picasso, pervert, died; Whitney, Winehouse, drugs, dead; Elvis, Methamphetamine, died

(on the toilet).

Van Gogh,
missing an earlobe,
died.

Plath,
head in an oven,
in front of her kids,
Woolf
Patron saint of insanity, I guess
waded into a river and-

River. River Phoenix. Drugs.

Natalie Merchant wrote that song about him in 1995.

Flash forward.
Me, twenty-one, drunk.
Proprietor of a collection of lackluster poems.
Sold their small, nonbinary soul to the Devil
in exchange for a fortune,
gone.

This man I don't know
stopped me in a room full of paintings,
asked me if I knew that
Helonias was having an ******

as she clutched the head
of John the Baptist
and pierced the tongue
that spoke against her-

I had always thought
the woman was mourning.

Her face seemed contorted
in statuesque grief,
but, no -

She was *******
as she mutilated
the first cousin of Christ.

How, strange, how brutal
a thing to know.

I described myself as a writer to my new therapist today.

That was cool

and it made me want to start making art again.