All the girls with their knees in the sand, stretching all throughout the shore, like a mass modeling gig
And me, I laid on my side, curled up and somewhat hidden in the sand
The buildings with their business, and their free form people, stood up and looked straight down on me
And I closed my eyes, and I held myself and cried

It was there that the salt air invaded my thoughts, breathing in, nose was running, I picked myself up, merely stumbling from where I arose
And I was warmer, climbing out from that umbrella, the sun touching these brazenly exposed parts of my body that I still tried my best to hide in such a setting
And Dandy, he's been gone for a bit now
So I split down the narrower parts

And the sun started setting towards my back, and my bare feet were starting to get cold
But the lights, they stayed lit, and dim like a friend in a moment of doubt
And a song played from the bar, it echoed a ways about, and all the people were hoping its words could save their moments and keep them somewhere

And some people gathered around me, asking me questions and looking concerned, from what I could tell
But I wasn't quite listening, I was too busy singing a song to myself
hoping my words would save my young body
from death
from aging
from something I felt

Often times a question regarding death, "what happens, where do you go?"
I'd say it's neutral, no ringing ears, nothing at all.
Though I've grown up neck deep in the tired and frightening atmosphere of death, nights spent as a child contemplating my own existence, I had learned to accept it at a fairly young age
This question no longer bothers me

Before I walked, before I talked genuinely, I was a million questions, a million ideas all kept under lock
And the way I walked and talked was not my own
And now, some days they'll call me a "man", but what I am is a hybrid of all of these thoughts
bright and faded colors, painted fingers and toes, distorted and vulnerable

And that sudden burst of consciousness at birth was the same I'd come to know in that moment, at the bottom with the fishes, counting pictures and having visions with my last bit of oxygen. Mermaids, gold glitter, and snakes in the water.
Never had I known such a gentle touch, among some collapsed lakeside cottage.

And that is why I am no longer afraid of death, because to cease to exist is not any kind of experience.
And I will always remember, the sudden burst of consciousness just before the renaissance that ensued from your touch.

And I will not wait
And I will sing in a violently feminine fashion
before the day my lung collapses

I woke up today at the border of the morning, in that old war bunker, crowded with boxes and medical supplies, missing the asphalt and the tree line
Half dead and unaware, in this undead pharmacy, taking fragments from the shelves
And who's really gonna stop me if there is no one around?
Wasted all of my prayers on all of the obvious things
days spent walking miles to the pawn shop, or the futility of looking for what to take with me

My visions of thin skin are poking at their veins, of which I'm having memories of in unrelenting fashion
and though I'm only 23 my heart feels like a chasm
of mayflower proportion

I think to write you a letter, think fast to find a pencil, but there never is one, so I crumble up the paper
I think to write you a letter, but there never is one
But it'd be cruel not to leave one
So with all the strength I can muster, with the most minimal of treasures that haunt this long abandoned shelter,
I am hardly able to form words, let alone sentences
The crumbled paper giving under my childlike formed fist
And I see my face in Judy Garland's, in the glass, my reflection in a framed picture
my Judy
The last letter
Spilling out from my lips

I am not beautiful yet
I am ugly to the very core
but I will rearrange my bones, if not for this, then for that framed picture
and what it reflected

mother's flats again, a size too small
breathing
the old, empty box of hair dye by the sink looks nothing like me
my hands leaning against the counter, another prayer
feeling my breath, a slow exhale
air
a vacancy, though a victory
counting
the contrast of a dimly lit kitchen and a shy, partly cloudy morning
i looked once more at the eviction
counting crosses on the walls
the toy beetle poking its wheels out of the small closet
darkness in the hall
gave one last costly smile before letting them sleep
it was all that i could do

i'm singing this borrowed tune
i took from Neil Young
alone in this empty room
too wasted to write my own

There is a garden here inside of my head, my flowers wilting away

There is a killer with a gun to my back, I'm gonna do what he says

I wish I had the words to say, my blood soaked brain
it stains the cloth that suffocates, baby's blue face
I wish I had the words to say, my aching state
I ate the taste, neglect my frame
a shapeless pain, no meal today

wring out blood and words and thoughts forever
wring out blood and words and thoughts forever
wring out blood, words, thoughts, forever
wring out blood
words
thoughts
wring out blood
wring out blood
wring out blood
wring out blood
wring out blood
wring out blood

writing poetry is a way to exist, to attempt to emulate the beauty of the me that I'm not yet but the me that's inside of my head, and it's all spontaneous, nothing planned or rehearsed because rarely does anything come from it

listening to music is a way to exist, I reside somewhere in a line I interpreted to refine an alternative image of this body that I refuse to accept

dissociation is a way to exist, cause the loudness of my own ambitions and dreams and goals, or rather delusions, can distract from my own nightmarish self image, but only for a moment

self harm is a way to exist, as I hope that the me that I imagine is stronger than I am and can tolerate far more punishment inflicted by either myself or my fellow human

******* is a way to exist, cause the lust I experience is never more prominent than when there's truly nothing left for me and I've exhausted every other method, and there is nothing to do but give in to the most worthless way to feel a sense of purpose

Emorie is a way to exist, because she's an exquisite reflection of the life that I've always wanted, and what I wish I could see instead of what I get when I look into the mirror and see dead eyes and unfamiliar flesh.

Rori counted all the boxes lying just down below the stairs
She counted with her young, thin fingers, that seemingly could break from the slightest weight
But as you could tell from all the oranges sitting safe inside those boxes
of projected ghostly leaves and branches
They weren't going anywhere

And Rori wiped some sweat from her forehead
Her crucifix danced with her movements
She reached into a sea of bottled water and helped herself to some
The queen upon a throne of wheat bread and powdered milk
Crackers and the usual canned goods
As a line of people formed before her, there was no more time to ****
Just near the truckload of backpacks of all colors of the rainbow

Rori knew, without a doubt, that this was gonna be the year
She'd go out searching in the mountains, through every crevice for the light snow that fell upon this city
In December of 2007
she was 8 years old that day
But Rori knew, without a doubt, that this was gonna be the year
That it would be back to stay

They want to tell you that the evil that I fall asleep begrudgingly with is the same that every single one like me is bludgeoning the innocent with,
I am not afraid to say it, I am not the victim,
I will stay awake for days until there's no more skin to pick from,
I'll sew shut the mouths of every infant to quiet every winter,
every mother will resent her womb, a fruitless wound within her
****** every father with these wide, arresting ****** eyes
and hips that move on their first ride enthusiastic like a child,
so certain in his mind with every ****** the ways that he'll betray her,
in a rabid fit of lust becomes a family annihilator

They want to tell you that the evil I resent that resides in me is the same as all the rest they deem as accidents
but it takes a heart of pure love and hatred to swim above the surface with a millstone round your neck

You likened me to a piece of art. Endlessly reflecting every tender sentiment. Every traumatizing connotation one could possibly interpret from the ugly world around them to boldly stand as a beautiful conclusion.

And perhaps that's what I could have been. Perhaps I was on that trajectory but it's funny how not unlike that same imagined piece of art, interpretations vary. Interpretations change.

I am art. A piece perpetually unfinished, left in isolation. Undesired.

I am a painting done through once loving eyes that's decayed and morally declined and become indistinguishable from its original vision.

I am trapped inside a suffocating abstract space where the only "consolation" is endless, mind numbing "reflection" that lost its value when crippling dissociation took over and my own living, breathing body started being horribly neglected.

I am art, but I'd give anything to be human.

I wanna have pale glass eyes,
I wanna have glitter freckles,
I wanna have marble fingernails
a dazed dancer in the swan lake
like a dying light
cast upon my porcelain
bound to catch what's bright
even when i'm blinded

hallway of spiders, garden of smoke

"come inside, don't be shy", she said
so i dropped to my knees and i dug with my fingers
the soil, falling over my head
coating my skin
mud from my mouth
deeper within
cover the surface, "believe, believe in me" i said

hallway of spiders, houses of dirt

in this life, there is nothing but this empty chairs, and empty faces
i'm in the lost and found
tell me you'll be around
your new friend
who never makes a sound
and i am well
and i am found
it's so profound

you ask me if i'm certain
you tell me the difference
but i tell you all feel is in love

Its persistence was the product of vengeful fantasies of fighting the abstract concept of injustice against it, regardless of its circumstances, regardless of the state it's in
****** up and dysphoric
but delusions wrapped in nostalgic plastic boxes
dissociation, nostalgia for things that never happened was the other half of its being
but then numbness from the disconnect between it and its own body, spreading to its capacity to feel anything
now to these longing daydreams

there is no longer anything that it wants
in this world or any of the other ones

there is nothing left to feel, be it touch or the old dissociative clutch

nothing to gain from pretending It exists, or writing in the first person,

my humanity is constantly in question
whether it's the cruelty of my fellow human
or these circumstances that have destroyed my self image,
put my young body through years of decay,
and killed my will to live

I tried to find the will to clean my skin, but it was spent on not collapsing
the irony in sacrificing my own health to maintain the means of surviving

I feel parts of my body decaying from years of neglect
the irony in slowly killing the one thing I've never stopped dreaming of loving some day

"don't look back, you'll turn to stone"
the words i heard driving past my old home
melancholic breeze sending sweet messages to my tachycardia ridden body, a bird that passes through in peace but drops dead like a fly within my smoldering territory
remembering the years I spent inside that home, time that in my fragile state today i'd mistakenly describe as a respite from my current place
but as I sink into my seat, the sobering reality that I am the same motionless vessel that I was then begins to set in
the labyrinth I could not escape still pervades my every waking moment
the days I coped with promises to myself, from a wealth of unearned confidence that has long since run dry
the only difference between them and me being the destiny I coaxed myself into believing at seventeen

i am a worthless pillar of salt

cursed from the moment a devil pointed his finger at something behind me

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

please
let me speak to you about fleeting things that keep me stitched and sane,
blood pours from my head, drips back down again
reminisce about the insignificant
reanimated, and buried with white roses
***** my vein
hide my face in tinted memories as i'm bleeding
rotting nest spent every season,
made me blind so project images onto my blank canvas
black out as i lose it
stream of red on violet roses
smell of death within my resting place
shedding hairs, **** the rest of me
killing hope, a devil's scheme that inadvertently
burned the roots of my family tree
i find the life hidden in this sickly stalling and the sharp pain of my suffering
so do i not deserve to live truly and peacefully?

foreign words
permeate my brain as blood flows through the cave
to drown me again
velvet gloves are not enough to keep myself from throwing up
at the thought of you doing anything
my blood stained finger tips tear through the fabric to rip at my own skin

and when you touch me it all just ceases

your sweet tone
dissolves into my spit-filled soul
a high that i can't replicate anywhere in this miserable childhood home
and when it wears i just want more
when it's gone i just need you to hold
the incessant shakes when i feel the weight of my aching bones

and when you hold me i sleep like i'm old

please don't leave me
don't leave me anymore

try to just hold still again
as I grip my own fingers, watching as they bend
trying to remind myself of what I can't forget
how can I be so brittle while day after day, taking every punishment one after the next
in every way I am so fragile, but cannot embody the essence of it

and I dig my knees into aging leaves, as they break apart in pieces, like severed limbs from the weight of me
where a thought sums up my own existence
a pairing of nature's bane and its own decoration shows me the difference in our senescence

thrown into deep water, feel my lungs fail
told to decay in a vague display of beauty
a block of cement and a struggle for breath cannot adorn a truly ugly way to die

in every way I am gentle, but I cannot express it

cant speak
offer you my teeth
pulling them
one by one
a bleeding cavity
whose words slurred and misheard
whose dizzy head orchestrates poor decision
whose rotting flesh feels incisions
to take away from decaying
pain to face numb complacency
trust you with where to cut me
feel so worthless in my misery
put me in your bed to bleed
hold me wrapped in blood stained sheets
hold me til my wounds recede
i love you please dont leave me
dont leave me

I've been looking at old pictures of rock stars in their prime
such feminine, almost childlike features compared to their current selves
There are some of Bob Dylan playing guitar with Donavan
And one of Lou Reed with his hand pressed against his cheek, sitting at a table with Jagger and Bowie, at Cafe Royal in London
and when I see them I think,
"I want to be young."
but I am young
years younger, in fact

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

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.

her body soothes my rotting skin
her flesh dissolves into it
my brain cannot resist the poisonous remedy injected
i know you have good intentions dear but i
i dont have them

spent the year sick and in your bed
blood stained sheets from every mess that i regurgitated
sickness strewn about your halo'd head
greenish tint staining the rim

and when i lift mine i feel
dizzying aches
strain to look out to the garden, lay still to see your face
do you regret everything you've ever said
my love, my everything
dear mother *****

everyone who ever knew me,
outside your mending gaze
anyone who ever told me
things i don't believe
who needs them anyway
just dig deeper into my skin
and i forget, when i wince
feels like heaven in your grip
my love
my love don't forget me don't
regret
  
everything i can't resist
bleeding in your makeshift replacement for everything missing, this mattress
can't take away the incessant aches
her fingers dig and dig and
she takes a break for a day
or three and i can't wait
crawling in every single inch of my skin
waiting for you to begin again
hanging on every word you say
my brain cannot resist the poisonous remedy injected
waiting for her to begin
again

and i can't wait

lying in silence




quiet



there's a dead poet, lying in the garden, lying in




silence

thirsting for anything, buried deep beneath the overgrown weeds of your garden

the artist
is dead.

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

.ti od ot ton nosaer doog eno em eviG

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.

her legs are wrapped around my neck like an albatross, a punishment, severed and divorced from her attention
love is the strongest when the smell of *** is infused with all of love's embellishments
it's intoxicating, a smothering affection
and no release can take away the rotting love that's in my brain
it's not just ***, i think her flesh dissolved into my own

sometimes it's the nails on my fingertips, sometimes it's the skin bitten off of my lips, I'm laying in this bed as I'm eating myself alive
either out of desire to escape or a way to sustain some obscure feeling of existing despite living a life that only consists of rapid decaying

my stomach's mostly filled with my own finger nails and skin,
but no matter how many years pass, i can't seem to swallow myself whole

the me that exists today is just something i unwillingly regurgitate

i am sad and angry at the fact that no matter how hard i've tried, through years of completely decaying, to keep a core piece of myself alive in hopes to someday live completely

out of all the possibilities for my future, suicide is the simplest, and least painful of them all

I said I'd walk the path but I'm paralyzed
Cause the demon on my back has numbed every nerve
Took it's two thin fingers and ripped the sheet of skin from off of my body
And I watched and didn't shed a tear

There are no more sobering moments for me
No catastrophe that can defy my conditioning to feel nothing as I'm decaying
The sedative has suffocated my will as the devils harvest every pulsating part of my being

without so much as a scream

flesh and blood
intertwined with lines,
lovely, but not poetic
we found no poetry
in the garden
and no use for allegory
just a form of sophistry
shouldn't be so cowardly
in your garden
sleeping,
smothered in moist air from the mouth of my mother,
with golden hair like hers
gentle and pear shaped
the smell of fruit moldering in a soggy paper bag
a violent departure
or cathartic release
loathing the honey
thirsty for poetry
i want to be
in your garden

at first i thought i wanted to be you
but i think that was me just trying to cope with the fact that
you are the most beautiful person i have ever let my eyes on
and that
i don't exist to occupy some abstract space in my mind where i am a trophy that no one could have, that means nothing to anybody but me
and exists to be pretty
and kept behind glass for no one to see except me
when i come back to dissociative thoughts to say "look what i achieved" but i think i see the truth is that
i look much better, separate, and beside you

with ****** sleeves, i sleep knowing
this is all for me
with pain in precarious places, i find in this state
this is all for me
every ache and release
every sense of burning relief
every taste too bitter to drink
every rest i can barely call sleep
every wound inflicted on my own skin
this is all for me

i've got a curse on my body, stems from a curse in my head, and i'm a curse to society so i'll curse all of them
and i'll form my hand into the shape of a gun, and i'll point to my temple just to give myself directions to the place where I was last fed and i'll crawl back like a stray cat just to be denied again
of another dissociative self-afflicted right of passage
then awake as the bullet fades into and back out of existence, just long enough to effectively exist as a migraine and not the cause of my own destruction,
a feverish kind of reincarnation that leaves residual traces of all of my past sins

all i want
not enough
dig a hole
can't return
to save myself
no exit
from the dirt
it's futile
rinse the stain  
gonna break
see my face
no control
see my eyes
don't exist
see my smile
can't imagine
feel my skin
never happens
to feel alive
never will
to feel something
can't resist
just to rest
no control
fall asleep
no exit
feel something
it's futile
just exist
never happens
just
never will
exist

the simplest thing I ever dreamed,
to take our clothes off and feel each other's normative bodies
with our vague residual memories of a high school campus ingrained in our brains from weeks and weeks
of being a part of something moving
so motion sick with dizzy heads and reddish cheeks
the bulimic teenage messes that we deserved to be

i saw her today
i don't want to explain the ways I'd crash into her face, similar shapes, the things we share just vague enough to where it makes me think of where I came from
If only we were the same
if i could make one mess, i'd smash into her til her chest caved in
i'd tear out both my legs and hope they bled, just to see how this long, blue skirt could lose the value in every thread that keeps it together
i would watch the nuances in the color
i would swallow what's in between just to save it for later
i would have my guts exposed to see what comes out from there
and if i could?
i would **** myself until i couldn't believe myself, as if i could see myself, just like standing through a mirror
i would eat myself
with my own mouth.

i wish death was as sweet as when it's romanticized
i wish you could **** me
in a way that feels like i am sleeping
i'd curl up in the comfort of your poison ivy arms
until i am so weak
and i could finally go easily
but my life is filled with bloodshot, hungry, swollen eyes
that stare right into me
and contemplate my very breathing
though i just don't care to see them
and they mean nothing to me
those same eyes that did condemn me to a life devoid of sleep
now depend on the conditions they all  imposed onto me
to hold steady and not subject them
to the trauma of my absence
it's the only thing hindering me from succumbing to this fractured spine that i exist with
even quicker than i will eventually

do you remember me

probably not
i never became anything

nothing more than suffocating, dissociative daydreams
surrounded by green leaves on lemon trees
i still could not thrive
amidst the accommodating salt air
still fading,
still weak
living on figurative life support all of my teens, now at twenty-three
decaying in one room, with one window looking out to an alley

can i even say i've changed

as romantic as it would be to say yes, and for the worse
i'm still not "me"

i do not even get the luxury of claiming i was once something before i turned into nothing

i remember claiming that i was trying to "be art"
in hopes that being an abstract museum of things you could see, but couldn't touch would somehow save me
but that is no way to feel
no way to be

i am no poem,
i am no painting,
i am no line i am no iris i am no olly

i am nothing

area of infection is stretching its tongue-like limbs out, a yellow and fleshy door blocking the hallway
so we all arrive at the same time, on the same night with a handful of solutions, then get tired by the next day
to, on occasion, try the same thing for the next two weeks, until we can do nothing but imagine that time before the cancer door did not exist