i'm getting a bit antsy in my skin:
a bit too tired, a bit too thin
and perhaps right now a bit like sin,
a bit like an unplayed violin.
i chalked it up to the unsettling din
but maybe it's something inside me, within—
something beside me, a has-been,
something to fight me again.
it's coming back, coming now,
and it thinks—i think—it'll win.

be honest with me.
it has to hurt a little,
right? it always does.

but when it does hurt,
slow down and say it with me:
things will get better.

having depression is a bit like
leading yourself on a leash,
only the leash is really a noose
and the one leading it can’t see.
it’s like suffocating slowly
between your own trembling hands
and a bit like drowning under water
as you whimper and wobble and stand.
it’s like wrapping wounds with cyanide,
and breathing ammonia and mercury;
it’s like dowsing in caustic acid
as you perform your own heart surgery.
depression is like laughing and
stitching tiny sutures into your skin,
but for every step you take, something—
something, **** it—
something tears again.

feels like it's gonna stop raining soon.
the sky will go back to normal:
cornflower blue and birch white,
cloudy bird's-down gray,
that same off-white color that hits me so hard.
i can feel it in my bones but deeper, closer—
a bit inside my chest and sideways,
something resembling my heart
but without the rainy bits.
it feels like flowers in the summer
with the petals stone dry, pressed
and flattened between pages;
feels like the rain has gone away,
run away to where the winds take it.
feels like it'll be another drought
with you gone away, dear,
and i'll hate these clear blue skies.

my tears are floating upward,
dribbling into the ceiling.
they're sizzling against the
flaking, cracking paint.
i don't know what to do.

i've got cotton in my ears
in a house full of people;
i'm blocking out the sound
but there's nobody around
and everything's too

******* loud

It's okay if you never confess,
if you're a statue, a virtue,
a paragon of pragmatism.
Just come to me, and I—
if you will let me—
I will love you
'till the day
we die.

it’s a pen panic,
an ache addiction, and
i cried today, i screamed today,
i made no sense today, sensed
no harm i say, felt pain t
like oranges and oceans.
i stood up today and fell
up, over and sideways,
flew down to the sky
with its purple stargazers
blue cats, maroon hats,
scarlet doves diving away.
i loved today, like any day,
but today i made no
sense.

i never knew that a heart could squeeze
this way or that way or sideways
or that it could ever feel so full
while being, at the same time,
completely empty.

i never knew that love could exhale
so sweetly, so sweet that a heart
could fly away and land in arms
that would patch it up and stitch it
together while it cried.

i'm trembling on the inside
because the hope right here has yet to die
and as i shake, my arms go numb
i let it go and drop my gun—
and as it falls, you shoot me.

if only i weren't so lonely—
then i'd have something to do with my life.