a thin rusting frame
is held up against broken glass,
frosted over by years of
sea salt

thick to breathe as snow,
South-easterly tangles my hair,
glosses my cheeks a cold rose

I cannot see myself
anywhere

I don't need no arms around me.
I pretend I love anyone. I pretend to drool honey onto the paper-thin skin of things that barely breathe through their own lungs that they've smoked black and blue and filled with water and soot and ****. I pretend to care for a moment, lighting a match on my teeth.

I don't need no drugs to calm me.
I pretend you don't make me sick. I pretend this isn't some kicked puppy ****. I stare at a weakness that swallows itself whole and then swallows itself again in the eyes, sizing it up, and erasing it with 3 grams of ****. Sedate yourself in your closet for a few hours, hide beneath six layers of clothes and clean fingernails and I love you's and pretend you're ever there for me. *******, how dare you be a normal ******* teenage when I'm sitting here rotting into the floorboards? My eyes are just puddles and my hands are still wrapped around your ankles. You don't need me. You don't need anything. You'll **** yourself slowly all on your own until you're someone entirely different, someone entirely yourself and you.

I have seen the writing on the wall.
I pretend like I don't think that me running a bullet through my hot, tired brain is an inevitable thing. I pretend like I won't lose my mind down the shower drain and unzip all my veins like a child's jacket, watching the blood trickle down me like rain on a window pane. I pretend like anything anyone says is really true, that I'm *really capable of living, that I'm really not too sick to ever be normal. I watch myself fall under the tar, sink into the roadkill, mold into the fluid marks under a raccoon, it's mask ripped off and teeth poking through its nose, carrion smacking the air with rolling guts in the summer breeze. I cook myself in the sun, let the deer's belly swell around me, I make my home in its smashed ribs. I pretend like it won't end like this.

Don't think I need anything at all.
I take a razor to my stomach, watch the fat peel open and burst like canyons. I tear it out with my bare hands, thick, tepid, organic. I lay it across the floor and throw up all the pills in order. I count them out, and lay each with a separate suicide note and not in any of them, do I say my name.

No don't think I'll need anything at all.
Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

All in all it was all just bricks in the wall.
This isn't right anymore. I won't say anything anymore.

*All in all you were just bricks in the wall.

Weakness makes me
spit bile into the softly sliced sunburned bruises
of bony arms
and I lock
sympathy in the basement,
it seems to me.

Forget about all the things you know about yourself and imagine this instead

I. I touch the soft tufts of your hair along your neck and wish three times during that instant that I could take back every bruise that you have ever been given.

II. I feel my shoulder against yours, warmth beneath chaos, lying low in the gardens in our hometown. I know in that moment you will shatter every belief I have ever had about love and replace it with framed pictures of me kissing your cheek.

III. I feel your arm around my shoulder and know that this is safety. I have not been afraid in what feels like ages when I hug you, count each rib, watch your face bury in my shoulder.

IV. I love you is bottled in every stare I cast at you. I wonder where I left my mind.

I'm learning how limited forever is in the space between two hearts.

You, I feel my heart swell when I hear your name. You're like my one night stand with happiness. You make me forget how completely cold it is. You remind me what beauty is and what hope feels like, soft and tangible, floating through the air like ribbon. You show me what it means to be alive, survive, swallow difficulty whole. I can feel your palms against my soul.

You, the illegitimate child of sadness and cigarette ashes, the tasteless poison that falls beneath my teeth. I can feel my heart sinking into the soft soil of you, planting itself in the wasteland where the bones of tiny things rest uneasy.  

Please, just let me sleep in peace for once.