It's been a while
Since I've sat down for this long
Just to write
All the words I can write

They call it a stream of consciousness
But I call it a stream of truth
It's a stream to remember
As it glosses over your skin

Maybe this truth
Will stick around
A bit longer than the sunlight
A bit longer than the nightlight

I don't want my writing to go away
I don't want my writing to be forgotten
I want my writing to stay
I want it to be remembered

A writer only ever wants to stay
That is the mark of a great writer
It's not that hard, to write for a long time
It's pretty hard, for that long time of work to stick around

But don't worry
It's just a stream of consciousness
It's not a hard thing to do
So we will just keep typing and praying for hamlet
To come rolling off our fingers

Hate this place I go when half asleep
The darkness pulls me in with my feet
Can't move, think, speak only feel can I
Overwhelming dread I'll definitely die

As the dark witch sits upon breath so shallow
Only last a few minutes time moves too slow
Brain naturally telling my body to move
Wanting familiars to help and to sooth

A wiggling toe brings light so near
The feelings of dread will soon disappear
Before I know it with all of my might
My body lunges forward back into the light

just lie to me and say the emptiness will go away someday,
tell me it gets better,
tell me I won't always feel like this.
I need something to hope for,
something to look forward to.
I don't want a light at the end of the tunnel,
I want the tunnel to be lit on the inside, too.
I don't want to wait until the end to finally be able to see.
improvement is not getting used to the pain,
improvement is the pain going away.
if you had a hole in your hand your entire life
yes, you would get used to it
but there'd still be a ******* hole in your hand
and I am trying to hold on but everything keeps slipping through the ******* hole
and no one is telling me how to make the hole go away,
they just keep saying I'll learn how to live with it.

Should I be concerned about the state I'm in?
I'm not sure how bad it is,
honestly
I can't tell because
what used to be bad days are good days now
and I guess that's what people mean when they say
you'll learn how to live with it.
I think you just become one with your demons
and soon you're saying things you never thought you would
like maybe happiness isn't all everyone says it is,
maybe weakness is a kind of strength,
maybe I just won't get better and that'll be okay because
recovery
is a marathon, not a sprint
but some days I can't even bring myself to get out of bed
so that trek seems impossible.
I am getting used to the emptiness;
I hardly think about it now,
and by that I mean I always think about it so
it doesn't seem like a big deal anymore
and these days crying is a nonevent,
my eyes are bloodshot more often than they are clear,
and my friends have stopped asking how I'm doing.
I guess I seem pretty stable and
I guess that's accurate,
I'm pretty regularly in a state of numbness
manifesting itself in
tequila and
the word okay and
art that people choose not to see the underlying meaning in.
I have written a suicide note every day for the past six months
but I call it poetry
and that somehow makes it okay to say these things-
by putting my turmoil into stanzas
it becomes a metaphor rather than a cry for help and
nobody will take this one seriously, either,
nobody seems to be concerned about the state I'm in.
I am learning to live with it.

I was trying to write something including the line
it kissed with no desire to heal what it had broken
and so I wrote
it kissed with no desire to heal what it had broken
but I didn't know what
it
was so I changed
it
to
he
and I wrote that
he kissed with no desire to heal what he had broken
but I thought about
him
and I thought about what
he
had done and I thought about kissing
him
and the things that were broken but not healed and so I changed
he
to
I
and I wrote that
I kissed with no desire to heal what I had broken
and I payed attention to the broken pieces that
I
had created and the people that
I
had kissed and I thought about what
I
desired and never have
I
tried to heal what
I
have broken.

Every human walks around with a certain kind of sadness
stitched into the tag in the neck of their coat.
They carry it like a wallet weathered from use
and old gift cards in the pocket poke at the seams.
They keep it tucked away like a pressed flower
in between the pages of their favorite novel
and find it while they're thumbing through
for that line about love that they have forgotten.
They leave it in the bottom of their shoe
and let it poke at their soles when they walk,
and, becoming accustomed to it,
no longer feel it at all.