You can pretend
That the black gloss
On my lashes
Will glue my eyes shut-
Make me blind to truth;
To ‘true knowledge.’
Go ahead.
Tell yourself
That my red-painted lips
Only spout nonsense.
It will only make it sweeter
When my wing-lined eyes
Give you whiplash
as I walk past you
To get my degree;
My award;
My paycheck.
Maybe if you’re ‘nice’
I’ll buy you an ice pack.

You like yellow but
I am violet.
The real question is,
why would a girl
that loves yellow to the
core of her heart,
would even bother to
pick a violet in a field of sunflowers.

Explaining my depression to my mother: A conversation

Mom, my depression is a shapeshifter,
One day it's as small as a firefly in the palm of a bear,
The next it's the bear.

On those days I play dead until the bear leaves me alone,
I call the bad days "the Dark Days".

Mom says try lighting candles,
But when I see a candle I see the flicker of a flame,
Sparks of a memory younger than noon.
I am standing beside her open casket
It is the moment that I learn everyone I will ever come to know will someday die.
Besides Mom, I'm not afraid of the dark, perhaps that's part of the problem.

Mom says I thought the problem was that you can't get out of bed.

I can't, anxiety holds me a hostage inside of my house inside of my head.

Mom says where did anxiety come from?

Anxiety is the cousin visiting from out of town that depression felt obligated to invite to the party.

Mom, I am the party, only I'm a party I don't want to be at.

Mom says why don't you try going to actual parties, see your friends.

Sure, I make plans, I make plans I don't want to go to.
I make plans because,
I know I should want to go,
I know sometimes I would have wanted to go.

It's just not that fun having fun when you don't want to have fun Mom.

You see Mom each night,
Insomnia sweeps me up in his arms dips me in the kitchen in the small glow of the stove-light.
Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.

Mom says try counting sheep,
But my mind can only count reasons to stay awake.

So I go for walks, but my stuttering kneecaps clank like silver spoons held in strong arms with loose wrists.

They ring in my ears like clumsy church bells reminding me that I am sleepwalking on an ocean of happiness that I cannot
Baptize myself in.

Mom says happy is a decision,
But my happy is as hollow as a pin pricked egg.

My happy is a high fever that will break.

Mom says I am so good at making something out of nothing and then flat out asks me if I am afraid of dying.

No, Mom I am afraid of living.

Mom, I am lonely.

I think I learned that when Dad left how to turn the anger into lonely?
The lonely into busy.

So when I say I've been super busy lately,
I mean I've been falling asleep on the couch watching Sports Center
To avoid confronting the empty side of my bed.

But my depression always drags me back to my bed
Until my bones are forgotten fossils of a skeleton sunken city.

My mouth a bone yard of teeth broken from biting down on themselves.

The hollow auditorium of my chest swoons with the echoes of a heartbeat.

But I am just a careless tourist here
I will never truly know where I have been.

Mom still doesn't understand
Mom, can't you see

That neither can I.

~
Whatever you say,
You do not delete the date stain on your skin
Over time it may likely to paly
Just think as the sun on the sky
But on the night when do not
Surely, somewhere else, off course in a different way
Or she has hidden behind the clouds

In the dark night,
Again she has arrested as the moon
Today, with the silky light of her,
Laughing this lake,
Bathing the distant hills,
Singing my lost heart,
Reminding the lost poetry

Her form among the many forms
How many words within the words,
The words of lost days
Her light, shines my love

The write which was only for her,
As the unfinished metaphors of poetry
Which has yet to emit moonlit
From the moonlight in a full moon night   

As if a prisoner who breaks down the wall of a dark circle
As if she has come to very near to my old door,
Light has fallen on her faded face again,
As well as the known mind of ours
Which is quite impossible to remove
Even yet that has proven the existence of eternal love
~
@Musfiq us shaleheen