i will be beautiful, i will be known, i will exist, i will live, i can survive, i will be something to believe in, i'll be real, i won't be down, i will find a way out, i'll paint my own life on my own skin
i can live, i can be alive, i can be able to breathe, i am dead
i am dead i am dead
i am dead, i am dead
i am dead
but i can be alive
i can't breathe
but i can catch my breath
I can i can
i can' i can I

Who am I pretending to be?
Can anyone tell me?
Pick up that pen and paper, who am I imitating today?
Who's passion and preciseness becomes filler and *******?
Who's vigorous melodies become the background to my ******* fake scenes of emotional clarity?
Who gets to be the air I breath?
Because God knows my supply is empty.
Because I wake up with worse eyesight than I'd gone to sleep with
And that's just so tragic to me, right?
Because my body does nothing but relay horrifying secrets and things to be afraid of, and all it takes is a glance to believe it
Because I've seen it.
But I don't want to lose the fundamental parts of me that just happen to experience this hell I'm living
I just want to stop this aching.
But no matter how many times or methods I use to say it,
it doesn't stop.
Words and songs, and things I want and things I want to be
colors and concepts that I find fascinating - no, life saving - no, everything to me
Art can't save me.
Art is what I choose to be, and I know I can't love, or take care of, let alone
save
me.

i can't give you the moment when you enter my home, and are introduced to its scent, and could not foresee that you would become so familiar with it. i can't give you any kind of structure, regardless of its condition. and though i exist, i just can't bear to prove it. you take me entirely on faith, and i should be forever grateful that you tolerate my absence and lack of transparency. and yet any move i make is not worthy, though i not only move, i disturb and wreck the space you've granted me. and still you tolerate me. my absence and lack of transparency.

I feel a pain when I look inside houses,
orange tint, lit like ****, like bloodshot eyes staring back at mine,
I only ever lived in cheap apartments, and we moved somewhere new every few years
People grow up in houses, they come and go when they're older, they die in them
My only experience being welcome in a house, a man I knew who's wife ended up dying in it
It was only weeks later when he took his own life in it
I'm afraid of houses, the implications of commitment, the familiarity, the comfort
When the foundation becomes cancerous,
These never ending thoughts of how your comfort can become a haunted house

I'm so afraid of death.

I know I wrote that poem, last December, 
I said I no longer fear death 
Let me correct it
I no longer fear dying 
But I fear death
God, do I fear death

Sometimes, I like to believe I'm a superhero,
queen of dissociation, maybe 
My trauma, my dysphoria is nothing in the context of this...prophecy, plot armor, whatever it is keeping in line with the story
of who I am, where I came from, of how this pain truly meant something 
but if I abandon fiction to breathe uncertainty 
raise my arms in front of me, bracing 
where do I exist outside of me

Scissors and slanted fingers
Skeletal trills
Stretched, hung, resembling my pollinator
sliding down my throat, and cut
cut,
cut
and choke on the blood
Thicker than pink or red
and purple and black
beneath my father

Catch me if you can, I'm spread above the earth
I'll catch a morning train so we can figure out what hurts
In a place of dying men
I cry sometimes, but that's all part of it
Yeah, that's all part of it, don't catch yourself

I leave it opened up, but you can put it back just fine
You're a sucker for that sentimental sorcery of mine
Stuck below the surface, I want to love you more
But that's all part of it, I guess, that's all part of it

I don't know what to say, I've done all that I can,
and if it really hurts then you can press your hand against the glass
I'll be there with you first, know you'll never have to wait,
no, you'll never have to be alone