The shiny white bottom of this bathtub - this is my defeat
And the way the water drowns out the final things I'm muttering to only myself
The way water droplets hit the wall like bullets as I try to shake these razorblades out of my head
How they all just fall and shatter so inconsequentially
And the stickiness of my ******, impenetrable sanity
Creeping towards the drain like liquid eloquence
Writing out the end of my story because I'm all out of chapters

The end.

I knew how to be silent. How to hold my tongue and close my eyes, and just wait until it was over. I learned how to be as silent as midnight until their words sunk into my ocean of self-doubt and drove ripples towards the surface I had learned how to keep as clean as morning

I learned how to feel like the smallest piece of life left on this earth, invisible from the skies that only I couldn't reach. I learned to curl up, contain myself, and remain as small as life would make me.  I learned to be everything small: small words, small dreams, small person.

I learned to hate. Hate everyone. Hate everything. Hate myself.

And then he said I was beautiful and I told him that couldn't be.
Because I never learned how to be.

The sad thing is that sometimes you're still there
In the back of my mind
In the tangle of my sheets
In the afterglow of our love
And no matter how I try to wash you down
With an overdose of one-a-day lovers
Who love me even less than you did
You're taste is still there
Forever written across my tongue
Like the bitter and inevitable
"I miss you"
That I still taste of
Every morning

So it’s this again.
Sitting at the end of a year, looking over the edge, and there’s still nothing below me
I’m at the bottom of my own “to do" list
I’m on the underside of the world

And I’m alone on the linoleum
Blowing out the flickers of another year
Cupped between my palms
While the wax melts down my ankles and into pools

It’s another 365 degrees of suffering
Because there are different degrees of that, you know
And I’m still sitting here alone
At the beginning of another year

Happy birthday to me.

I woke up one morning with a seed in my heart
And an incurable inability to ever let it grow

I held it in my palms
Cupped and concealed in overgrown cowardice  

And it never broke past the spaces between my fingers
Or through the holes in my heart

I held a seed in my heart
When my heart couldn't hold anything else
Waiting for it to spread it wings

I watered it in the stormy procession
Of four in the mornings and twenty years laters

And I woke up one day just a seed
In the heart of... this?

With a resolute inability to ever grow

There are sixteen messages on my answering machine

Human interaction, you know
I try not to do that anymore

Although I'm not trying much of anything lately
I'm not sure there's anything left to try

Everything I'm feeling has already been felt
Everyone I love has already been loved more

I don't know how to love someone anymore
I don't even know how to be someone anymore

People make my sense of self shake
People made my sense of self in the first place

There are splinters of humans in my consciousness
But mostly it's just me in here

And it's actually none of them on my message machine
Just a bunch of telemarketers
Selling me their souls for nineteen ninety nine

I forgot how silky apathy can be
Constricted around my waist
And laced up in the back of my mind

Always there, always far away
Until everyone's out of sight

I think I've washed away and all that's left of me is residue
A slippery silver lining
Of what my sadness felt like between your toes
Crunching under your steps

There are 5 steps to recovery
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in
Don't breathe anymore
All the stepping has stopped

And it's quiet on the ocean
The waves aren't crashing into the stars
The stars aren't bleeding into each other
Not as long as the winds don't move

There's a film on tips of wave tops
Thin and disappearing
All that's left is residue