Sometimes I get startled by my own thoughts,
they creep through the walls of my mind
haunting like a ghost, physical like a corpse.
And I only notice them when it is already too late.

When they have already been formed,
they already exist, weight.
I’ll throw them like stones to a pond
and they sink, sink sink
until it fills fills fills…

If we’re God’s paintings,
I want to ask him
to stop adding layers
to mine;
that I have always liked
incomplete finishes.
That I need no more
lights–
no more life–
Than he can please
bring me to an end.

Have you ever been happy?
Been so happy it was blinding?

Have you ever wanted to die?

I am terrified of being low again
because maybe the next time I hit the ground
it will **** me in and I will never
get to see the light again.

I am terrified of imagining blades on my wrists.
I am terrified of the black sluggishness in my brain.
I am terrified of the stitched smiles upon my face.
I am terrified of hopelessness and shame.

I don’t want to be low ever again.
I don’t want to live through that pain ever again.

I want to live.
I need to want to live.
I need to see life as blindingly white.
But I see the feeling fade away before my eyes,
and I can only reach for it with lanky arms;
my fingers gracing the reflection of something
that was long ago solid but somehow melted,
vaporised, disappeared.
And I will be forever too weak
to do anything about it but learn to miss
a happiness I began to mourn the day it arrived.
I can only watch as my reasons to live go away
in a hope that my mind will not conjure up
a new list, but for the reasons to forever stop this pain.

The hall boozed with excitement.
The first exam of your GCSE—
it was a subject you could barely pass.

And so you sat, while everyone else
laughed, cried or revised,
you closed your eyes.
Your left hand on your right one’s wrist.
Adding pressure to it as if to stop the bloodflow.
More and more until someday
a blade would no longer terrify your brain.
Training yourself
for the moment you died.