I've got a list of things I have to pay and a list of people I owe and favours I'll never be able to repay.
I can't feel love or happiness or pain I just watch everything happening and it's so tragic because amidst our progress  nothing has ever really changed.

At work I disguise hospital beds for home,
But everyone can feel the stark truth--
It hangs in the air,
"You'll die here",
And I can provide no answers or words of comfort to ward off fear.

No matter how hard I scrub
I will never be clean.

I tried to tell the truth but they smothered me,
No one wants the truth-- no one wants that responsibility.

I remember when the chemo failed,
your family asked the doctors "isn't there something you can do?"
they turned to me, like I was guilty,
and said "no, you're wrong, this can't be true".
"palliative care" "hospice" "comfortable" euphemisms fell from my mouth,
they tasted bitter like acid and lies--
I wanted to scream and cry and tear my heart out.

At night I lay in an empty bed,
and when I sleep I dream,
I wake up next to a body bag,
my mouth too terrified to scream.

Remember us.
We built monuments in our name,
and cities to accommodate our existence.
Remember us.
Concrete, steel, pavement.
We were here.
We destroyed life and slashed our names across the globe.
When there's no one left to remember us,
The wind will whistle through the empty streets,
the hollow concrete buildings will crumble,
but we always had a lurking suspicion that our monuments were empty--our existence subtle.
Remember Us.

I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Filled up with 150 different flavours of ice cream, 100% fat, 100% diabetes. Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
All night drive-thrus, the Golden Arches of heart disease.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Super sized, double order of fries, any kind, anytime.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Gobbling up commercials selling the same **** a million different ways.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
absorbing political excrement like a big fat chocolate candy bar.
Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake,
Gobbling up fear and propaganda, I slurp up lies, and wash it all down with a big ******* to a blatant reality staring me square in the face. I assume ignorance and deny responsibility. Give me more.
I am the swollen belly of a snake, bursting, spewing ***** over cities, because we knew deep down  it couldn't last.
They filled me up so full I vomited violently until there was nothing left.
I am the empty belly of a snake and I am hungry.

This is the kind of happiness that comes in waves.
Water fills coves and beach shores but just as quickly as the waves were given, they're taken away.
The tide is at its peak and I prepare myself for the emptiness I'm going to feel when it leaves.

I don't want to feel ok,
Ok is a lie when I see wars on tv and I just watched children die.
Please don't be ok,
Please don't let this be ok.  
Don't let a false sense of security become an excuse for apathy.

Don’t trust anything around you.
Everything is a lie.
Can’t even trust my own thoughts or your thoughts or what you say but I’ll consider it all.
We’re a consideration generation with no truth.

I want to live my life effortfully.
I want to expend my energy while I have it and chase things that are meaningful if only to anyone but myself.
I want to feel in my bones that I am god. My own personal god. The voice I hear in my head, I want to know without a doubt her power.

Abortion access and rights are being slashed and women’s voices silenced by forced pregnancy and poverty..
So when I got my period this month I felt the need to celebrate.
I don’t have to grow a life to participate in an existence I myself can’t justify.
I won’t have to raise a daughter as an incubator for a state of lies.

"Be the change you wish to see in the world"...
But I was born upside down
and instead I am all the things I know I need to change,
but don't.

I work in a hospital,
sterile, too bright, monitors beep,
everything's bleak except you.
I know you're dying and as I check your vital signs I try not to speak.
You tell me once you're better you'll take me to dinner,
I wish I was optimistic, I wish I didn't know better.
So instead I take my breaks in your room,
we sit there and talk over ****** hospital food.
When I work night shifts I watch your mother cry while you sleep,
It's eight o-clock, she hasn't had dinner, I remind her to eat.

Within a moment I understand the universe— and then it is gone.

I watch the sun come up; this is the third morning in a row.
Darkness, darkness, darkness then suddenly light.
Light sweeps over hills and reaching golden rays intrude even the darkest of corners-- this is the bravery of the sun.

I broke up with you
Because I'm dishonest; a cough syrup symptom of walls I built so high.

I broke up with you
Because when I look at you I hate you; that glare of pain in your eye. The pain I've caused it hangs like smog over once beautiful hazel-greens.  

I broke up with you
Because you remind me of my parents' relationship... If you could even call it that. Doomed from the beginning, loomed and grinning over my sister and I.  

I broke up with you
Because I'm an *******.
Because I'm afraid.
Because I'm selfish.
Because I don't deserve love.

My aunt is a journalist on TV,
She conveys messages to millions of people.
She's been to Afghanistan and around the world;
Providing a voice to those with none.
She is successful, intelligent, kind.

My grandma and I sit down to watch her show this afternoon--
My grandma wants to know what my aunt is wearing,
She tells me "she looks fat"
I say nothing.
Because we're women.
How many people ignored her message about the Syrian refugees? How many people thought about her hair or her body instead?

I'll meet you in Paris and we'll talk about the weather.
It's just small talk though-- something to fill the silence,
you'd think we'd know better.

He doesn’t talk much about where he came from;
maybe he’s scared the truth of the place would speak more than he could.
Maybe it’s hard to explain the hunger or the times the power goes off or the constant fear to someone who’s flown above it all.
Though we don’t talk about the sand or the fruit on the trees or what the rain feels like at the end of the day either.
We’ve lived moment to moment and learned what we know of each other through the present.
Somehow I yearn for this place I’ve gathered pieces of. The place I cannot know but that grew inside me.

I'm scared that 'becoming' who I am is just an acceptance of realities others have created. Maybe the older we get the more entrenched we become in what we perceive to be the truth; the more we experience of our tiny existence, the more we believe in it.
"The way of life we live, a life we have never really chosen, forces us to walk past what we see."

We are all falling into chaos;
our houses of cards are crashing.
If we could zoom out time like you can a camera lens,
we could see the spectrum for what it is and maybe we could truly witness universal entropy increasing-- it's always increasing.
We would be witnesses to the truth of dust, the truth of chaos.
We could be seers of time and space and float above everything, escaped from the race.
Instead I can only witness my small blip of time from own my small perspective.
I will watch politicians and global warming and the world run around in circles and I will call this chaos.

Sometimes I wish I could disappear
They never guessed this would rip me in half,
This is ripping me in half.
But it’s fine,
It’s just fine.
I can’t get high anymore,
I can’t get high because I need more and more and more and it’s never enough. It’s never enough to forget.
It’s never enough to forgive.
I can taste metal in my dreams—
this is all the life I’ll ever need.

Medicate a generation,
So no one wakes up or asks any questions;
I'll take the pills because the truth doesn't make this worth living,
and I'll take the drugs because I'm tired of living a lie.

The truth will never set you free.
It doesn't even exist-- it's just based on each person's own view of reality.
So instead of the truth I search for love.
It was the only thing that ever made any sense to me.

For me to be alive I must eat.
For me to eat, things have to die,
And for what?--
An existence I can't even justify.

Don't leave me alone with my thoughts,
they're eating me, tormenting me, they're at the centre of every battle I've fought.
Don't leave me alone with my family,
they're living out their dreams through me and I'm so scared to let them down.
Don't leave me alone, don't let me go, don't let me drown.

These last few months left a bad taste in my mouth;
The bad taste of dagger flavoured alcohol,
Of too much ****, cough syrup and coke.

This month left me empty and broke,
I want to choke out the truth to you but some things are too painful to speak--

I never imagined something so painful wouldn't bleed.

I'm the thief of your dreams; I've gone and turned them all black.
Everything you wanted for me, everything you hoped I'd be I threw back.
Now you worry and smother me with all of your good intentions,
But I lie to you through my teeth-- even my "truths" are inventions.

I am a crumbling doll of ash in a city of paper...

I crave a different state of mind,
Make me more honest, make me connect with people make me more open, smart and kind.

I don't crave the come down,
Make me feel tired, make me sleep but have bad dreams, make me feel distant, make my body ache and head pound.

So when the money comes around like it always does I'm constantly torn between up and down, a battle of is, isn't and was.

What is a eulogy?
A confession of memory--
An avoidance of the singular truth.
I'm whispering to ghosts with no ears like they do on Sundays, in stuffy confession booths.
Eulogies are for the living,
The ones he left behind--
For his mother and father and two older brothers,
and truths to answers that they'll never find.
Eulogies are for the living but he's taken me with him.

My dad is so proud because I'm going to university,
My mom sees hope,
And my sister looks up to me.

I'll become a doctor,
and my mom will tell her friends,
I'll have kids and a husband and take antidepressants.

I want to die so bad sometimes but I'll never take that leap.
My life is a promise to them I've still got to keep.

I can feel the chemicals ***** under my skin,
I can feel the sunshine pouring in.
Another day another dollar,
another distraction to silence the callers;
All those people who want to know where I've been, or all those who genuinely ask how I've been.
I've avoided these truths at all cost,
If I never look back I'll never have to face what I lost.

At your death I was a ghost,
lying next to your body, I tried not to choke.
The suffocation of words I didn't say left me tired and broke.
I wanted to lay in the morgue and
f
  a
    l
      l
asleep with you there,
next to your blue glass eyes and brown curly hair.

The parting gift you left for me-- a dialogue in my head,
your ghost screams at me at night, I’m never alone in my bed.
A chorus of morphine alarms and IV drips silence me; and they sing my songs for you instead.

I am a global citizen, a temporary resident of this earth,
I barely exist but I refuse to be anything less.
I refuse to bury my head in the sand behind borders.
Borders are just ideas, right?
Ideas that compartmentalize people and places,
It's easier to be apathetic to foreign faces.
It's easier to be controlled and lulled into the hamster wheel that keeps the world going round in the right direction for those with the money.
As long as we run and don't ask questions the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
But the worlds' pain is my pain, and their pain is your pain-- wake up.
Children are dying in horrific ways, people are suffering, and the real irony of it all is that it doesn't have to be this way.
While I'm writing this, the old boys politician clubs of our "democratic" countries are smoking cigars, driving foreign cars and talking about the weather.

I had a happy childhood,
it exists in my mind as the salty seaweed smell of the ocean and my mother's sun kissed garden.
My mom planted tomatoes and black eyed susans in her garden,
and her infinite love for my sister and I was reflected in everything she touched.
Everything she does is a labour of love (will I ever be like that?);
Her love is a labour so strong it turned me into a prism, giving me the ability to love the world,
shining through me and the things I touch and now,
I have a garden where I grow tomatoes.

Over and over like an endless love story we are pulled back together.
No matter where we go,
No matter all we've done,
You are the fibres of my existence-- and I will always come back to you.

I am God of the fishbowl,
Every reality past these water blurred walls doesn't concern me.
In my fishbowl I am heard,
I matter,
I make a difference,
There is a God,
There is a God,
There is a God,
I know because as I swim closer to the glass I see his face reflected back at me.

I tried to reach out to someone about depression.
About how I want to die.
He talked about his life--
Then we had ***.

Sometimes I want to float out my bedroom window;
Past the unkept yellow bungalow,
Past the fir trees and the winter carcasses of rose bushes,
Past all the street lamps and their glow.
It's time to go.
I feel tired and torn and the soles of my shoes are worn.

You like me better when I'm high,
I like you best when you lie;
I guess that's why we're friends.

When I'm high it's not that I'm less sad-- I just feel the sadness in a different way... and somehow that helps.

I'm screaming,
But my voice is trapped in glass jars you've saved on the kitchen shelf of our small country house,
and you listen only when I'm gone,
and only when you miss me,
Because I'm better seen and not heard,
Who wants the truth when the face that tells you it is pretty?
Distraction is better than facing reality.

I ****** my best friend.
We were drunk, but I can tell she wants me sometimes-- even when we're sober.
I forgot about it until lunch the next day. Hit me like a ton of "ohfuckwhatihaveidone" bricks falling from the delapitated crumbling building that is my life.

I ****** my other best friend too.
He's in love with me, so maybe it meant something more.

I'm not even that pretty-- maybe they just like the concept of the "hot mess"... Or maybe I'm the one attracted to them, maybe I feel I have nothing to offer except ***.

We’re all afflicted with the same blindness,
grabbing at objects in the dark,
Fighting because we don’t know better

On the fourth floor of the brick wall barricade,
We stood at the window watching the rain,
I felt calm watching water drop suicide;
I thought how it'd be nice to die by your side.
My mind breached every professional boundary,
but my mouth remained closed,
looking back it was obvious-- they should've let me go.

I stayed with you on the worst days,
when you couldn't pick your head up from the bed.
Instead of encouraging movement and intervention,
I just sat there, right or wrong, and tried to follow what you said.

If you wonder about truth you realize a singular thing doesn’t have one truth but many, from many different angles reflected in a million mirrors.

The summer sky was slashed across our backdrop,
and the bleeding sun beginning to fade,
we counted out the hours, minutes and the seconds,
wishing all the moments we lost could've stayed.
And in that moment I loved you,
I loved you so sure and deep,
and in our temporary lives, on this temporary earth, this temporary moment made it all seem...
worth it.

Globally, the number one killer of children is diarrhea.
Usually, this can be prevented by drugs that cost fifty cents.
But I needed that new car,
I deserve designer jeans,
I have to look good this season,
Because life means nothing compared to things.