Tonic and breweries.
This home is beginning to resemble a boy again.
I don't remember moving in but
I don't think I'll ever forget each wall
As they stood around me, and
how unsafe I felt within them
Without them really knowing that I was there.
I've always had this theory that
Non-habituated houses collapse more easily
Than the habituated ones.
When put through a hurricane, you were the non-habituated one
And you didn't recognize my presence inside of you.
When we collapsed you only felt your own pain,
But I felt mine as well as yours.
I don't know if you know that I still feel it.
I don't know if you know that I feel it every single day.

The first time I looked for shelter again I found one of your floorboards
In the space where my heart was supposed to be.
I didn't know how to cordially invite you
To walk all over it again-
So long the creaks it would produce wouldn't scare people away.
It gave motivation to the dreams however,
I was in an empty home and you were always sending me postcards without a return address.
You claimed you were always just about to move in with me, in these postcards,
But everyday it said the same thing.
It was a recurring nightmare.
I hope you never need a return address.
I don't think I can stand the pain of feeling you smell my tears on paper from 100,000 kilometers away.
I thought I could, but not anymore.

The scent of your presence always reminds me of tonic and breweries.
Because you drink when I'm there and you drink when I'm not.
I don't know how I associate heaven with the scent of someone
Who loves to fill bottles with secrets and then swallow them down with someone else's pride,
But I do.
And now and again I still wait to see if heaven will keep me sober enough
To watch me get drunk without actually drinking anything.
We burnt down bars, night-clubs, wine-galleries and cupboards of bottles,
But I don't know why I felt the same euphoria then when you threw me into the flames.
Maybe heaven was really a smell after all-
I'm still trying to find a way to love its wrath without smelling its scent.

You asked me to write a poem about you so here it is:

Hell is brown-eyed.

Today I watched him put his heart into an empty locker again...
He did it slowly and cautiously,
As if to put emphasis onto how long it's been since
He's satisfied himself and not satisfied me.
He used to indirectly claim
that I was smaller than his textbooks-
that I was smaller than his backpack, but just a more heavier weight to carry.
I never knew if he saw the strains I felt more as a burden than he did-
but if he did he ignored it because I never lost an opportunity to turn my pain into a fire-alarm.
Every day we talked about how if it ended it was worth it and
how it still made sense even if we counted days like a bombs detonating time.
His locker grew colder,
And I watched the clock more and more-
I guess he couldn't tell that
I was measuring my heartache with each heartbeat
That burned per second.
I guess he couldn't tell-
Because we talked like we knew each other.
Now I watch him put his heart into an empty locker...
I guess I shouldn't be surprised when I hear a heartbeat inside of there,
That belongs to neither mine,
Nor even belongs to his own.

You eventually get tired of seeking answers to all of your problems when
You've reached your seventeenth birthday and you're bored of trying to change
Because you've managed to convince yourself that it is alright to be an artist
With only a teacup as your motivation to actually have an aesthetic.
You reconciled a long time ago that it wasn't worth the trouble
roaming the streets and picking up inspirations from everything that you see.
You developed a longing for someone who wasn't there and now you're clinging
Onto the void they left as you watch the dreariness of your life
Pass through phases you're too exasperated with trying to describe
almost every time you find yourself alone without your intention.
Sometimes you try,
beginning with, "It's funny how the coldest people can make your heart feel the warmest."
or
"I wish I didn't need to spend my life relining structures of my own heartache just to be able to exist functionally," but,
the rest of what comes out doesn't really correlate with what you feel
and everything you beautify now becomes everything that stops being real.
You had to learn how to strip everything away.
Now you fill your bedroom with thoughts until the lights go off because you're too tired
To say darkness is an excuse. It's not what inspires you anymore.
So you've allowed yourself to only listen to artistic thoughts you experience when you're staring at your grandmothers teacup.
She gave it to you before you even knew how to make tea and now every night before you go to bed you stare at it like it can give you something the streets of capital cities with
big towers and dark skylines looked up on the internet past midnight when you were
miserable couldn't and wouldn't unless you actually went there.
You sit at your table and drop the teabag into the cup, just like your grandmother showed you. You have no image of what contents are supposed to dissolve,
But you watch the water as it changes colors so quickly. Clear to brown,
Clear to green, Clear to red.
You watch the ripples like sound waves,
affecting everything from the centre of the cup to the edge of it.
Those ripples are so small but they will affect everything eventually.
You imagine little people, colonies, not exactly living in the water but living
In their own version of reality where water is to them what sound is to humans.
"I wonder what happens when someone drinks all of the music out."
"Nobody lives. That's what happens."
You then imagine plummeting and the way teacups are a lot like rivers which people throw pebbles in.
You see the curve of the ceramic, the paleness of the white over the blackness of the stripes next to it and the way the bottom of the cup is rounded whilst visible even when it's filled with dark liquid...
You then think of human bodies plummeting into rivers.
In a way stones are sort of like teabags and when people's emotional burdens are materialized
They sometimes take the form of both.
(Here's a burden- put it in your pocket and jump into a river. Tie it around a string and dip it into your teacup.)
It's so whimsical how clear it is how you feel about people.
You wish you weren't as desperate as this- to think that it was artistic to think about ending
Your pain at a time where everybody wouldn't notice you're awake.
But you know that they also think these but don't express it because they don't have a pain their trying to destroy with revelations of meaninglessness.
You have now changed your aesthetic into your coping-mechanism,
And nobody needs to know.

Every single night you stare at teacups and think about why you're here and why you're not.
You still haven't found a reason and now you wish you never thought about rivers before you drank your tea or even got out the teabags.
Because now when you see teabags, you only see stones.
And instead of dropping them into boiling water you want to put them into your pockets.
But it's your aesthetic and it is your art.
And you'll never stop doing it,
You'll never stop doing it...

I sometimes wish that self-awareness came inside of a pill.
Because now,
My days have been principled into a misery
I feel when I pretend to be someone
Whose face I see more than my own.
The way an actor out of work,perhaps,
Would roam their lives indifferent to reality-
Wearing a mask of paint, cloaking their emotions in thick layers,
Holding in their words in case a crack destroys
their non-existent role.
Tendering within and playing a part in a society that cannot keep up
with the ever-changing personality of a character who has no storyline to follow.

The name-calls to all stage positions siren in my head every morning,
And I am left disappointed continually as I hear every name
Except my own.
Everybody needs no 'disguise' except me and i spare no energy thinking
Of ways to mask the energy I spare creating mine.
I would work too hard to be myself if I worked at all,
But,
The work is still spared when it's used in efforts to change who I am...
Though you may see the make-up on my eye-lids,
You will also see the eye-bags which surround them from nights
Spent lying awake wondering what color it should be.
Though you may see the likeness intentions in my counterfeit expression,
You will also see the subjective scar of all the times they were practiced in a mirror
Which showed their real reflection.
Though you may see the plastic in the way the necessary emotions are showed,
You will also see the stains from all the tears that were shed
When they were suffocatingly tightening the skin underneath it.
It is bland the way the preparation is more strenuous than the presentation,
Yet often it is overlapped behind it...
And nobody can tell the difference.

I am controlled by a director beyond me,
And he carries out my pain in the slick of the pen he writes the details of my stories with.
He holds it tightly,
As the ink lets out a permanence that suggests flawlessness
In the style
of continually writing tragedies upon tragedies with absolutely no mistake.
He let's no uplifting, no state of miracle show as he continues with his masterpiece.
Dwelling from sequence to sequence as I follow the dullness in his path. Almost
Hoping that he will eventually realize that sometimes the actor can turn into the character,
And when real pain becomes false pain then you should learn to know the difference.
Sometimes I scream to him when it has desolated to the point of an eternal fictional epilogue.
I tell him that I have learnt from the tragedies- that I now know every emotion this mind can feel,
And the plasticizing of emotion itself will become inevitable if it is forced to have to feel them again.
The apathy created by this
would be counter-productive to what he wants me to feel,
And more often than not he will become disappointed by having his efforts shattered
By the same unfeeling mind he was trying to destroy.
The name-calls are inevitable but what happens when the name you left out doesn't care
That it is left out.
You can re-write all of your tragedies but sometimes you'll feel more affected by them than the character who you wrote them for.
And,
perhaps you'll never know the difference between crying out loud when the stage curtains are open and
Crying out loud when the stage curtains are closed but,
Perhaps you will realize you are only as alone as you want to be...

...After all,
Mutual hypocrisy always sticks within the step of each character
In the loneliness of a life spent as a play
Where,
The writer is the only audience.

have you ever believed
in something so blindly
so genuinely
that the moment you realize
it isn't true, something inside you
changes forever?
i wanna tell you a story, see
seldom do i ever
go swimming in drinks
deep enough to drown in
but when i do
i speak in tongues
about things that none
of my memories
are allowed to talk about
like that christmas
at the isthmus
where my girlfriend
plucked a conch shell
whiter than gods teeth
out of the sand
held it to her ear
and stopped time
that day she was a shade of blue
the could've made the ocean sick
see, she loved to play jokes
when she held
the sea shell to her ear
she gasped, called my name
and said "i want you to hear this"
i said "yeah, right, everybody knows it's just the same old sea"
she replied "no. not this one. this one is special. listen. theres music in this one"
she handed me the shell
like a promise she couldn't keep
and i held it to my ear
with all the potential
of seeing shore
after being stranded
at sea for years
only to hear
a tired dirge of silence
spill from its emptiness
i guess she didn't know
how desperately
i wanted to hear it too
because ever since
something inside me snapped
now sand pours out
of every post card i open
i hear seagulls
in telephone static
sometimes i have dreams
where i bury my hands
in every beach
i've ever been on
and exhume this graveyard of noise
every time i try to sleep
i spit up fishhooks
and i guess i'm obsessed
but maybe
if i hold my ear
to enough vacant things
then i could have back
the time stolen from me
since it happened
maybe they would get it
if they knew what i wanted
when i blow out birthday candles
maybe they'll find me
face down in a wishing well
i watch eternal sunshine
of the spotless mind every day
pretending i can forget too
because this sea sickness
has followed me for years
because yesterday
i walked into a music shop
and all the pianos broke
but the only thing
i can think to say is
*do you know how bad
a memory has to be
that you fantasize
about forgetting it?

Do you know how it feels like to have a stomach that can only survive on intimacy and nothing else?
To be prodded to love all the things that touch your skin whilst simultaneously not being
allowed or able to tell the difference between the things that love you and the things that want to leave you barren?
How it feels like to see the solemnity and grandeur of an omnipotence within all the sinless intentions of the skin cells that you'll never be allowed to hold?
Well...
It feels a lot like the romanticization of an eating disorder.

Sometimes you fall in love and then begin to forget how your organs are supposed to behave.
You look in the mirror and realize that you're still thinking about someone else when you're
Analyzing your own body.
You clutch at your own skin,
your arms,
your hair,
your throat,
and begin to try and disassemble a mind that does not want to be associated with the body that it is working in.
Before you know it,
Every time you cross the mirror you clutch more and more parts of yourself and wish that they would not feel better in somebody else's hands besides your own.
You're getting thinner everyday,
you're losing sleep
you're forgetting how to breathe,
And somewhere,
out there,
There is a boy in a place far away,
giving to someone else what you are about to be killed
without.

You realize that you turn your own bed into an ocean everytime you think about his face.
You feel the hydration of the salt water from everywhere around you,
tickling into your senses and diffusing into your nose,
but you do not taste it.
Only sense it.
You're grabbing the sheets desperately.
Holding them onto your chest, covering up your shaking body, and
almost certainly forgetting the difference between imagining the embrace of somebody who does not love you and drowning alone inside of your own bed.
You look for a lifeboat in the form of a thought that has no relation to love or association to the idea of affection.
You're hoping to find a distraction that will either save you from your peril or help you breathe in a way where you can still be conscious when there is water inside of your lungs.
You're beginning to see dark shapes and figures and all of them are sprouted by the idea
of just having a little taste of the very thing that's about to drown you.
All of the dark figures are in the shape of your face,
And nobody is here to save you.
You begin to sink,
And sink,
And sink,
and sink
and...

You are empty when you wake up.
Your chest is not an *****,
but you find it funny that when it feels empty,
your stomach also wishes to feel the same way.

So you make sure it does,
Whilst yearning for a meal that does not wish to be consumed by you.

That is the only meal,
that you will never stop craving for.

this is an open letter to anyone who has the audacity to try and love you like i did.

dear whateverthefuckyournameis,

i apologize in advance for spilling my boiled blood on the hem of your skirt. what you need to understand, is that you are standing on ground previously reserved for my feet, so forgive me for any bitterness that seeps through the cracks in my clenched fists. i don't hate you, but i can't be your friend. you probably don't know about me, and if you do, let me commend your bravery. i have a tendency to set my problems on fire, and in my bouts of anger everything looks flammable, especially girls with paper complexions. i'm sorry. i have never been one to walk away, so i don't know how to explain to you the holes in the bottoms of my shoes. but i have been further than you will ever go. this is not supposed to be an angry letter, but lately that's the only thing coming out of me. i don't even know your name but the thought of your hands reaching for him makes we want to break them. i will douse your dreams in gasoline and strike the match against your cheek. but i know that's not right, see, the poison crawling out from the end of my pen belongs to a scarier version of myself i try not to know. my heartache is an insatiable war cry in the dead of night, that will stop at nothing to shatter all your windows. it shames me to admit that i've found a sort of twisted satisfaction in using passive aggression to breach your armor. i am sick with missing a set of arms i was not privileged enough to know. i speak with all the grace of an atom bomb and wonder about the rubble at my feet. you are white picket fence and i am barbed wire. some girls are lions, some are lambs, and i learned to love, teeth bared and snarling. one of the only things that keeps me going is the hope that one day i'll learn how to love something without making it bleed. i may have never been his, but for a time he was mine, so please understand why i taste acid when i think about your mouth on his. again, i am sorry. i know it is not my place to be so full of resentment, but there is a part of me that sincerely hopes it bothers you to know he dreamt of me before you were even a thought. there is a side of me that thrives on the image of the color being drained from your face when you read this. but i am trying to learn how to be softer. this letter is the manifestation of a self-inflicted war that has been raging in my chest since he first told me about you. you will try to be good to him, and you might even succeed. if you ever find yourself singing him to sleep, like i did, don't ask if he wants to hear another song, just keep going until his breathing slows.

- m.f.