Dear Academia;
I took the adderall
because I thought
you wanted me
to be a machine.  I didn't
understand that
amphetamine tasted
like candy once you
got used to the way
your jaw locked and your
ears rang.  Dear
academia, did you
see my face when you
read my GPA, did
you see the way I stayed
up too late after my
after school activities
trained me to live with
anxieties?  Dear academia,
why am I afraid of the mirror?
Why did you teach me how
to write a perfect paper but
never prepared me for
the look in his eye when he told
me he didn't love me either.  Dear
academia, i'm ******* and you're
swallowing me, does the sting
of your impulses feel better
when you know you're eating
my hard earned money?  
Dear academia, why
do you give me empty promises?  Why
should I spill my blood with
this diploma, list
my ethnicity and birthdate
next to the insignificance
of what you think makes me
worthy, do
these details feed your
impending due dates or
are you just getting off
to the idea that
only the educated few
know how to
think straight?  Dear
academia,
I tried my hardest
to let you fool me, I
can feel your ego fattening
beside me as I watch your
children scramble for their
ideas of monetary
gluttony.  You're increasing
our wage gaps, do my late night
tears fuel your addiction to epistemic
poverty?  Dear academia, you
taught me to think critically.   I am on fire
with the matches you forgot
you hatched within
me.  Scorpions occasionally
eat their parents and I hate
to admit that this ****
has me hungry.

No matter how good the intentions are human beings always seem to fall short.  It's unfortunate how late this realization comes, like water to lips that have been thirsty for too long.  I keep picturing you in my kitchen holding a gun to my head.  I keep picturing a cadillac with a dog in the backseat.  I keep picturing myself in your mother's house.  I keep picturing you holding your own hands over a toilet seat.  I keep picturing the nights I will have without you.  I keep picturing us screaming, our voices waking the neighbors like they always do.

I don't like the wind.   I don't like the way it demands attention.  The wind always brings things.  Change, weather, tornadoes, *******.  It's always brewing.  It's always there.  Even when it's lacking it's waiting for an opportunity.  I sleep with the fan on in the place I put it for you.  I wake up in the middle of the night freezing cold, but I don't dare change the setting.  I listened to that album you told me my love ruined.  I threw out the underwear with the holes in them.  

Every time I get drunk I feel ridiculous. Every time I press my fingers to my lips I wonder if you miss them.  I wonder what you are thinking.  I picture us in separate houses.  When I am forty and you are forty one.  I am doing something.  You are doing something.  Maybe I have kids.  Maybe you're married.  Maybe we still think about each other.

I felt like a comedian waiting for a laugh in a room full of people with their mouths sewn shut.  I was forcing a feeling of weightlessness that denied it had a landing.  Our lives are composed in milliseconds of turning down chances and decision making. Our lives are played out in what we choose to keep avoiding.  We are the moments between waking and falling asleep, the moments between sitting cars and deciding to put the keys in the ignition. We are all love letters without postage stamps; only an inch away from the finish line with one ingredient missing.  Every day feels like a Sunday.  Every day feels like a traffic jam. And nobody wants to talk about it.  Nobody in the elevator.  Nobody on the street.  Nobody wants to breathe an inch of evidence that we've all learned the art of hiding anguish in a laugh track.

grandmas blue pick-up truck her
missing tooth and her
maple syrup scented aprons
with me in the back listening
to LeeAnn Rhymes and snapping my 25 cent
bubble gum to the rhythm of the radio, I
remember tying my shoelaces backwards, thinking
it was funny to trip over my own feet, watching
my grandmother's hands fall apart as she
chased me through the Cherry fields in
Door County, Wisconsin.  When I came
home to a flickering tv there was always
an oppressive silence from the kitchen floor like I had
just missed the third world war with my
mother's wedding ring on the kitchen table, my father's work
uniform neatly put away, my crayons
on the bathroom floor like abused bullet shells, I tried to
document the information but it had already been lived
three months before, I had only missed the final showdown
when two atom bombs refused to
explode.

It was jaded submission.  It was competition.  It was the breath between hiding and fully addressing the existence of another human body.  This is where she lived.   This millisecond behind making eye contact with a stranger on a bus at 7:48 am speeding through a moping city with her backpack slung around her shoulder, filled to the brim with grapefruits because her 57 year old cancer-hoarding ******* of a father always refuses to sell the grocery store and thinks vitamin C is super important.  She watched tired bodies try to ignore the fact that they were born with legs and brains and hearts.  Motivated by waves of coffee and the kisses their significant others sleepily planted on their foreheads before reminding them to hunker down in their bus seat and get some reading done, she watched these people ignore the fact that a long time ago their parents decided to **** the brains out of each other.  Maybe if she sat there longer one of them would look up from the palms of their hands.  This was a morning like any other morning, a morning without feeling.  A morning without heavy. She didn’t actually care that much.  That was the trick; She just wanted to believe she did.

People, like swarms of ants.  People like tornadoes.  People like an earthquake, running from one edge of the street to the edge of a different alley.  And nobody looked up.  Nobody knew where to put their hands.  This was the thing that got her;  Nobody ever knew what to do with their hands.  It was only when they ignored it, when they forgot the existence of their body that they actually knew how to touch the things in front of them, that they effortlessly existed like oxygen exists without color.  Maybe that was the point of life:  If you wanted to get through it you had to forget you were moving.

I felt a sickness
in his kiss.

He didn't know that I already knew.
I wore red to his funeral when I was eighteen.

We re-live the things that change us.

II.

Blink.  
The living room is still
a dull shade of alabaster.

A beat up can of
PBR sits crumpled
in the corner like a
forgotten love letter to God.

The radio is still on.  It hums good charlotte’s wondering
like a middle school yearbook hums omitted connections
and promises of eternal companionship.

People are passed out in couples.

III.

A dog barks somewhere.  I wonder if he’s starving, too.
I touch cereal boxes, cheese plates, bread bowls and panic
between the sheets of an unkempt and unfed twenty one year old.

IV.

I am twelve years old and i’m
standing behind a podium having
an anxiety attack in a tweed jacket
and barbie light-up sneakers.

Nobody knows what i'm saying.


V.

I ask the mirror if it's joking.
The mirror laughs back at me.
The mirror grows hands and masturbates to
every other reflection its seen before mine.

VI.

It's noon and I'm accidentally
cutting my hand open on the seam
ripper he used to communicate.

You are not
the cinder block of aggression
that kept the bathtub
from touching the
floor.  You are the ears
below the floor, you
are crouching
beneath the cottonwoods, slowly
molding into the support
system of a 1950’s kitchen
that a man’s hands learned
to bleed between.  You are his
father’s sweat when he
delivered him from his mother, you are the fists
he used to pound his reasons, a woman’s
tears seeping and melting in resin.  She
lay barefoot before you, completely naked
sliding her hands between her knees, wondering
why the bare spot is so empty when
there are bruises on her eyelids, on her
face, in her mouth; Why there are no hand prints where there
should be.  The prettiest parts of us
become compromised with badges, badges
we tell ourselves make up for the battlefield
we were too young to witness, she
wishes she would have learned ballet
when she was young, when her hair
still held shape.
When she slit her leg
and bled crimson you caught her.
You watched the human race
become disgusting with
desire. You
are composed of the same wood
they used to keep a cradle lit. The
wood of a casket, the
same wood of a white cross
in a room of crying soldiers
who finally realized
they served no benefit.

So many writers compare love to a cancer but always forget to condone its ignorance, unaware that its blind multiplication is a specific torture to what a body has always called normal, unaware that it was put here only to destroy the one thing it will learn to call his other, it is only trying to keep you warm, it is an infant searching for better blood, it is doing good it is doing good, it is swarming closer and closer to your heart it is trying to make something inside of you laugh like you did the first day it realized your insides felt holy and it is only when it kills you does he realize he is alone.  This is why we visit graves.  This is why it is hard to understand why the goodbye felt like a twisted last breath in the palm of god’s hand. Why nobody left a phone number.

I was uncertain of the time frame.
At least that's what I tell myself.

How many times do
you roll over in your sleep
to make what you know you've done
wrong feel like less of an obstruction.

This is the salt in
water balloons. This is the bated
goodbye.  This is the
time of death announcement.

This is home.
This is abandonment.

This is a ****** stump
This is a phantom limb.
This is a kiss.
This is nothing.
This is elsewhere.
This is giving in.
This is sinning.
This is marriage.
This is quantities.
This is qualifiers.
This is me, I am a body.


I am words.
I am impermanent.
I am blood.
I am water.
I am carbon.
I am sorry.
I am apologies.
I am motion.

I am in love and it's
as horrible as
everybody
promised.

This is waiting.
This is timing.
This is counting.
This is praying.
This is driving.
This is coughing.
This is bleeding.
This is losing.
This is loving.
This is painful.
This is kicking.
This is thrashing.
This is sleeping.
This is nyquil.
This is *****.
This is hurting.
This is waiting.
This is waiting.
This is waiting.
This is lonely.
This is loneliness.
This is swallowing.
This is learning.
This is ******* up.

You can't remember
the last time you were
all in a room together.