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.

The eighth deadly sin is co-existence.

That is what the bible forgot to tell us.
There are scriptures of love, connotations
Of how the heart works and how it beats and what forces
It to start and stop but,
none of them explain what it goes through, when
It beats for another human being.

The arteries from the heart in a hand do not only carry blood,
But also, thoughts as fugitives of elegance which
need to be released.
The structure within them carries itself within each existent-form
On earth, and veins and arteries were made to be intoxicated
By the supplies of it in the form of what their minds choose not to remember.
It was made that way by the antagonist of memory, and
the screen on which it is displayed onto becomes eternally shattered by its strength of other loved analgesics.
Within the shards of the shattered screen is a motivation of malice,
That expresses ******* within the blood as it is circulated around of the body.

When the empathetic assemblance of the sharpness in
Both the blood plasma and the glass shards become
Heightened by the knowledge of an instigating love for illness,
It is too late for the body to blame it on anything but the contents
Of its own mind.
Eventually the walls of each blood supply will transform into thin layers of restriction,
That allow everything in,
but nothing out.

Poison is planning, and self-infection is the key to only replicating happiness.
So because of this,
whenever a man holds a human heart in the creases of his palm,
He has no choice but to bleed on it as well.

This is not for anyone else but himself...
I have learnt that today.

In the August of 2013, my therapist taught me how to feel pain.

She sat me down on her couch, put her hands around her knees,
And said that I was ready to learn about the juxtaposition of love and self-degeneration.
She recited to me as I was perfectly amended, and wrote down a scripture on the walls
As I watched from her susceptible whole-draining couch.

I began to litter my mind with an effervescence as she talked,
I pleaded and broke my solar plexus to let it shine within me as she spoke fluently about where I will be in times of darker days.
I listened, and let cognizant dissonance transform into regular dissonance,
As we feuded over some emotions that she claimed to know better than I did.
When the dissension was destroyed with my evenly wild dismantled separation from depersonalization and reality,
She stopped scribbling in her book and looked me straight in the eye.

She asked me how I felt and I told her that I did not.
I told her that I am a vessel for the supremacy of a mind that looks at prominent self-worth
the same way it looks at the particles underneath a shoe or the water at the bottom of an under-gated puddle. I told her that I have never opened my eyes since my father figure transformed into the door I used to hide away the tears of the woman who raised me up. I told her that I am a conundrum with a voice that is shadowed by the memories I witness and replay over and over again but have never actually ...really...experienced.
She looked at me like she expected to hear every word that came out of my mouth.
She was more a carnivore in my eyes, and by the time I realized how much an allure surrounded my depositing of impressions into this woman's central nervous system,
I was already telling myself that I have never really needed sanity.

She professed that the boundaries of my life were created by an inner turmoil,
And I would notice its symptoms and prognosis if I would just open my eyes to its horrifying truth.
By the time the room was filled with lies, I had already told enough truths to let her believe that assistance and recovery were the things I came into the room for.
She told me that I was a functional disorder, and I told her that that was patronization.
At the end of the session, we both seemed to feel equal over the fate of a sequel to a previous encounter with our regular conversational dissonance...
She gave me a piece of paper.
And it became a burden.
With a despondency I created out of her bickering and my dejected submission,
She ended the session and let the emotion run free from the tone of voice she used to impractically aid me.
I picked up the paper and picked up my serenity and created more demons out of the gracefulness inside of me,
"Open your eyes, Mzwandile."
I casted hope upon my pocket, crumpled it up until it meant as much as it usually did,
and exited the room with a prescription for a new life.

Your arms are follicles of disinterest.

Though I am unsure of what their intention is,
They move around my waist in time
With a lack of clarity of what it all means
to be in love.
Affection and lust is all I feel
And when you say you love me their appendature continues
to grow whilst my waist does.
A surging increasing of whenever you touch me.
The voices that pardon me are larger
Than my conscience, and sometimes the thought of you surges
Beneath me,
like a virus or an earthquake in a shattered continent or both.
My heart becomes a state of liquid, the temperature of the air
Transforms to a prominence of length. I grasp everything you touch
I grasp you, I grasp the air. I look around and I cannot seem to
Find land where your eyes do not roam. The centimeters of everything
You've ever held combined with the emptiness of my palms.
The hollows of my retinas seeing pain when I see right through you, my crave
For becoming sub-ordinate to everything I've never known in life, a deriving
Of isolation for the way your fingers crawl so weakly against the meso-folds
Of my tense shoulders. The way they press, clutch, grab me and force them
Towards you.
Upon the shaking ground, where you lean in against my neck and
Pretend to know the secrets which have all the weight on my collar bones. Quakes,
Within you as well emerging from layers of participate, holding ashes and loving ashes,
Burning them again and convincing them that it is intimacy. Tendering flames
That induce smoke silhouettes on dancers that do not dance. Clutching their framework
As if you can make structure out of burning buildings,
'hold me' the flames whisper. From parted lips that are sighing against yours.
Burning buildings do not touch the lips of angels, but you force yourself near me.
I am nothing but a shattered window within a distraught avenue,
The fire grows and you are simultaneously caressing me and crying for help.
Upon the glass shards of my ragged edges, the tension increases with each
Sunken word you forget to say out loud.
There is mesmerization between clutching and grabbing and pulling and releasing. The sensation of us impending upon each other like runaway trains,
the way we shall crash with what we
Know in terms of devastating realization.
Sitting on the same bench as our life forces collide like they were miles apart.
At the breech of creating a history that only I will remember.
You burn everything down,
And once I am ashes you will claim to increase the passion of everything you feel towards me.
I am a burning building, a shattered window, a flame that whispers 'hold me'
And you are nearing my lips. The earth conclaves in centimeters and whenever
You breathe, I measure it.
Exhalations are beautiful but so are the seconds between us. You hold me like a chamber.
The world only rotates on the bench we are sitting on, the wood has caught fire and
So have the trees around of us. I am impending you to burn with me and every
Component of our surroundings is not pardoned by your refusal.
You love me, you say,
And just at the moment of our lips meeting,
You realize that everything impresses you in the completely wrong way.
.
The flames will not cease.
but when you stand up and leave me you do not feel them.
Your arms were once a catalyst to the expenditure of heat energy
But now, I burn ceaselessly.
You walk away as my flames spread.
They spread to the ground, set fire to the soil, and follow your footsteps in hope
That they will incinerate you.
But as the memory of love disappears,
so do you.
And the fire that follows you incinerates everything but your skin.
When you then hold your next burning building,
My flame will be there, watching you, everything you do
It will combust upon itself.
And cause catastrophe through the means of a lack of what you claimed was passion.
Your love will incinerate things that cannot be burned,
And my flames will watch, hoping that you will expenditure what you thought of them too.
Ceaselessly, they will fade away,
And you will only burn everything...
'I love you' you will say,
And then,
you will only burn everything.
...

I go to public places to be alone...

I sit amongst the crowds,
listen in to their instigating alluring words,
Exhaust myself with the false pretense of social-comfort
And think about death.
As it has always been and how it will always be-
More potent than human interest, temptation, enticement or fulfillment.
In the depths of these crowds I surround myself with
The culture of the unconscious.
Nothing has ever mattered but the collected cognizance of
The fact that no human being has the internal ability to become immortal-
And nobody who belongs to the crowds worries about that. As,
To be comfortably existent means to be uninformed about your own
Insignificance.
When I am aware of my own body I am more afraid than when I am not.
I watch myself from a blackening screen,
as I destroy what I was born into until it becomes
A habit instilled within both perspectives.
I let the crowds ruin me with glances and words and drunken love
That they will not remember.
I exist as a vessel, and let the pain of my future determine the pain of
My present.
I seek to hide within the dark of a night like this that has experienced my absence and enjoyed it but,
Their glances make me feel so present...

..I can only hide within myself
by pretending that I am outside of myself..
Watching from a blackening screen...

1. The seconds roll by and you're starting to realize that you are becoming wearily accustomed to this way of living- the way where you are so obsessed with emotions,now that you do not feel them, that you are surrounding yourself with accidents. Almost as if you want to be in the same area you were at before you crashed and burned, by re-instituting an old lie you thought could never be accounted for, and crashing and burning a second time- all in the exact same places.
You've started changing and merging so much that you're sure you've left everyone without them even knowing it. As if you move with stealth whenever someone starts to realize just how tragic you can be- how you don't really need to feel to make others weary, you just have to be there. Your existence is enough.
Maybe that's why nobody really knows you, it's like being a thin piece of paper in a world where pen can only leave ink on thicker substances- whenever somebody asks you "Who are you?" you just turn your head shyly, and read from someone else's page.

2. It's been a while since you've substituted blankness for a renewal you thought you could find inside of another human being. You tell yourself that their words inspired yours, but are realizing it's not true. Love was not made to make the expression of detrimental things beautiful- the absence of it was.
Now that you're here as a mosaic of bruises that were left from somebody's poor negligence, you've begun to see that loneliness is an escape that treats you better no matter how hollow it is or how much work you have to put into fulfilling it.
Your hands get strained, your spine starts to curl, all under the weight of forgetting the emotions you had when you were writing for someone and not about them. A weight thats heavy and makes you miss the feeling of being in love more than you miss the person who you were in love with.

3. Instead of only being able to find inspiration when you hear specific footsteps walking away from you, you've tried to simulate their echoes every time you close your eyes, and then hoping for the best. With love, you knew about the withdrawal symptoms before you knew about the substance. When you had it and watched it fade away- you were left with that familiar feeling. That familiar longingness.
But now you understand what you must do when people enter a home uninvitedly. The next time you have it and lose it it will hurt, but it will not hurt in the same way.

4. Sometimes situations have a way of making you both aware and unaware of different things at the same time. Being in this state you realized; there is more than one way for a person to actually disappear.
And it never starts within them, it always starts around of them.
You started seeing less, feeling less, talking less, hoping less. You just followed what was there for you and hoped you wouldn't fall into a hole deeper than the one you were already in back then.
By the time you'd lost enough of yourself, you had the motivation to climb back up but just not enough physical strength to actually do it. You just followed the path and blamed its emptiness as a feature of your own intentions. When in actual fact, you only followed it like that because nobody wanted to lower themselves to be able to have the ability to walk with you.

5. A natural stationary position of yours is the position where it looks like someone has pushed you to the ground: you are always posed at that exact position, where you have just been pushed and you are simultaneously trying to get back on your feet.
Whenever you find yourself at a dead point that is caused by something that isn't a human being, you realize that it's always been 'too long' since you've dealt with a heartache that you are not used to.
Too long since you've carried a dilemma whilst thinking, "I don't know why this is here. I don't know why I am feeling this."
It's become this sort of pleasure that you sleep with knowing or not knowing just how far away healthiness is. Lying in bed all day pretending like you are whole- pitying your own broken heart as if you were not the one who broke it yourself.

6. It is hard to convince yourself that you are an optimist because of the way you express hurt like it will actually start saving you when you are not just feeling it, but when you are actually seeing it as well. But then again it all makes sense when you begin to realize: you beautified terrible things when terrible things began to happen too regularly.
It is not that you are trying to feel more of the pain because you are putting it into words.
It's that you are actually doing the opposite.

7. It's hard to keep up with your own identity when you are constantly turning people that know you into strangers.
You sometimes want to say it was spontaneous, but you've always known that it started with one small problem who always lied whenever they claimed to care more than they actually did.
They'd treat you with a kindness that had no actual action and you got used to depending on it like it was the only thing that you had left.
I guess when you get older you realize that sometimes people make mistakes and open things they're not supposed to- sometimes they rip holes in your mind that are big enough for the thought of their love, but not big enough for their love itself.

8. You're discovering that submission is more a habitat than a personality trait. You've pulled so many defenses around you that the only thing you dominate is the ability to come up with a false pretense. All the things that once meant so much to you seem to be running and fading away- they seem to be blackening out like the developing of a Polaroid in reverse. Slowly suffocating an image until the surroundings are disappearing slowly and malleably. Leaving only the person in the picture- surrounded by the blackness of the film.
Deemed to become an island in a great mess of things that could've been-
Deemed hopeless and passionless, hopeless and passionless.

9. You may or may not have been stronger when you were younger but you were definitely more content and aware. How many times have you looked at an old picture and thought "what happened during the years? was that really still me?" It is almost as if the time between then and now turned into a vast ocean and you were fast asleep whilst you sailed on it. You sometimes sunk and you sometimes rose above, but you were always unconscious. Always unconscious.
You guess that it is all what is eventually planned for you. But you can't help but shudder at the thought of it.

10. You hide away from attention because if people start to see just a little, they might eventually see too much.You're hoping one day you can show yourself as whimsically as you once did before you were forced to hide from a light that demolished you after it blinded you.
Maybe one day you'll exist under the presence of something that doesn't need to hold you to give you the same feeling you once needed to be able to carry on hoping.
You're just looking for a motive to keep you surviving even if it is only partly- You're just looking for an excuse to become addicted to something that doesn't have a heartbeat,
For once.

The tide is back in my head again.
The bottles are full, the floor is still an ocean,
And I am drunk-texting a future version of myself.
I'm telling myself about this certain type of forgiveness-
The version I tried to suppress everytime you couldn't accept it.
I gave you nothing for so long I thought you'd fall in love with at least re-opening the non-existent wounds,
And now here you are painting scars upon them and showing them to me,
And I don't know what to do and,
I'll never know what to do but,
This is where it ends,
Yes,
This is how I leave you.

The tide is back in my head again.
- I only leave you when the room is spinning.
My head is a confession booth and its like you're sinning on purpose.
Continually hurting yourself or someone else so that you can come into my memories and
try and tell me about it without saying anything at all. (I only listen to you when you're not speaking.)
I started believing in ghosts when I saw apparitions of myself smiling without knowing you existed-
I once lived with a fear of death, prayed to be immortal and to keep on finding myself hungry to know more-
Now I find myself lucky to have a day where I care more about continuing and care less about remaining stationary.
Maybe I want you to feel the pain of a sunken ship only mimicking the illusion of a boat cast on waves it no longer wants or knows how to sail-
Maybe I want you to know how it feels like to love you.

The tide is back in my head again.
I created a soundtrack for all these recent nights and it just turned into the sound of your voice repeating the secrets I dont remember telling you.
There is a drawer in my room and I've filled it with something that both creates and destroys me because
you claimed you would do both but only ended up doing the latter.
One day I'll stop being haunted by things that can't actually touch me -
One day I'll find a bottle that won't have you at the bottom of it.
But for now I have nothing else.
So, I'm poisoning myself everynight and claiming that it is self-mortification.
I cannot forgive myself but,
I have no other outlet so,
This is where it ends,
Yes,
This is how I leave you.

My journey to purification began on a night where I pretended like you didn't exist.
I denounced myself a pagan of memories,
turned your forgotten words into forbidden hymns,
embraced them in my mouth before I climbed into bed,
and used them to sing myself to sleep
in all of the hours before I did not dream of you.
It was like burning a house with memories in it,
because you need the ashes to reconstruct a new one.
It was like holding your breath even when you're not in water,
because you have experienced drowning and do not want to risk it again.
I kept on telling myself that this was peace- leaving you was not enough so I had to leave myself as well.
Here is a version of me not at war with you- here is a version that is telling itself nothing has changed even though it is barely existing.
Here is a version moving violently around with nothing to restrict it- here is a version dancing whimsically alone.
Here is a version so small it cannot be stampeded on- here is a version so small it cannot hear its own heartbeat.
Here I am trying to struggle free of you,
Fighting myself so that you don't have a chance to.
But as the days go by,
I am hoping only my cocoon loved you.
And the self- inflicted scars will one day stop belonging to me
And,
belong to some other shell,
restricting the body of,
some other boy.

It is a trial to be free when you are an addict of the prison that held you.
I've been teaching myself about how wrong I am-
That I was not born to make a home out of love,
I am too poignant and sensitive
And cannot belong to anything.
Though the chains may be comfortable,
I need to sacrifice ecstasy so I can find a new lifestyle that is not inspired by their heaviness.
I need to find real fulfillment before it's too late.
Before the chains leave me instead of me leaving them-
Before I'm forced to gallop into any new home I see because I was never prepared enough to be able to stand alone.
I want to forget the way I lived for you,
I want to burn everything without feeling the need to say sorry.
Why must I wait for your forgiveness when everytime I find the urge to reconcile myself,
I'm forced to choke out apologies before I even act on anything.
Why must I lie awake unsure of the future,
Seeing things smaller than you trying to fill a void they won't fit in,
Holding me down so that I cannot be bigger than them.
I know now that I am susceptible to allurement as intensely as a mirror susceptible to light,
Because I am now a reflection of a love I barely experienced.
I stay awake in my sheets every night - praying for my own forgiveness,
Even when I have the ability,
To turn things that don't even hurt me into punishments.

Last night we told the town about our pseudonyms.
And, because the stars shone too bright
And we were left exposed with our tragedies hanging through the air,
I had to teach you how to paint the sky a darker color-
So that no one could tell the difference between our affectionate self-satisfying thoughts and,
Our misspoken words.
You always spoke like you knew more about being detached than you did about love.
Your shaking hands, your posed expressions,
Always tethering to always want to fall apart but almost too simple and beautiful
To ever be able to do so.
At the beginning I watched your lips blow through the light in your flute,
Trembling slightly to create a sound greater than my memories of the only voice I've ever fallen in love with.
Again and again, as you inhaled and exhaled, lightly creating that shape that only perfectionists can create-
And it was hard to believe those lips were now right besides me,
Muttering 'To die by your side is such a heavenly way to die'
over and over again without them even knowing it.
"Let's talk about heart break." you would say.
Let's talk about how you couldn't find a pool of enough antique movies to drown the romantic guitar music in your head with so you just used apathy instead.
"Lets talk about introversion."
Let's talk about the way you heard words you could not listen to- the way you constructed lies to the first pair of hands that offered to hold you, the same way you constructed a mask of indifference when they began to shy away to another girl in another school.
"Let's talk about nothing. Let's sing instead."
Let's sing that song from The Queen Is Dead by The Smiths.
Let's pretend like the queen died the second we sipped our first glass together.
The people are rioting in the streets, the people are screaming and refusing to march but we do not care because this isn't the first time we've stripped something away from ourselves
Whilst wearing a grin and pretending like we're complete.
This isn't the last- drink on, drink on.
There are two types of people in this world - the ones who get hurt and the ones who destroy.
You never knew this, but I was too busy figuring out if I had to become the latter just to be able to conquer love when you came into my life again.
I thought I would feel no calmness when it happened-
But it turned out I conquered love in a pint-sized African cafè.
With a girl who sometimes wore her hair back like Audrey Hepburn and thought that
Calling random boys on the phone and screaming 'Im in love with you' even when she wasn't was a perfectly acceptable way to spend an immaculate Thursday evening.
There is a light that never goes out,
There is a light that never goes out.
And even if it did go out,
I wouldn't worry.
Because you'll always be right by my side in that tiny cafè when it happens.
And you are something between radiant,
And radioactive.

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 am made up out of dreary routinely aspects."*
.
The afternoon always spans out throughout each morning,
And I awake within each in a bed I have spent eternity within.
I unveil the sheets, stand myself up onto the ground,
And rub my eyes of their tiredness.
I adjust the straps of the clothes I wear, and stand up
And just wait there.
The room is usually empty and often I feel like I am apart of the paint of the walls.
Like I am stuck upon them like a rock in the concrete or a figure that can be scraped from it.
I un-mount my position like a fly un-mounts a jar and swindle across my bedroom to
The door and go through the unfamiliar house to the kitchen where I collapse onto the chair.
I stare at the table, and caress its granite. I stand up and fix up the coffee in the corner.
I listen to the whistling of the kettle as it replaces the birth of an old silence.
'Its cold outside' it reminds me. It's always cold outside.
I pour the coffee and add the sedatives that would otherwise leave my thoughts racing within me,
And sip from the cup as I stand in the corner.
I leave it, sit at the table, and stare at the granite again.
The wind outside is not whistling, but rustling the leaves. I am reminded of thunderstorms.
Lightning, thunder, clouds, lightning, thunder, clouds,
I sip the cup again.
There is an old familiarity behind the noises outside the window,
I **** myself uselessly to infatuate a rhythm to the steps of the branches of the winter trees.
The kitchen is filled with the noises of these audacities,
and once, perhaps last year July,
Their repetitive sounds would escape their waves and induce me frightened alone in my kitchen chair...
But now, they do not frighten me.
Not since last year July.
I pick up the teaspoon from the side and enter it into the cup,
Neither have been washed from their last usage or usages.
As I stir, I hum a melody that is quieter than the rustling. A melody that is quieter than me myself.
When the coffee cup is empty, I lay my hands onto the granite and force myself up.
I stumble towards the door and through the house and back into the bedroom.
Sometimes the days are loud, and sometimes I am a figure to its silence.
I enter the bedroom and sit at the rocking chair that would of belonged to someone else
In another world where there was furniture for the restless women who stayed awake...
And I do not rock, I only sit.
My sleeping gown covers my legs,
but if I could, I would imagine a dress much shorter than this.
Showing the scars, the marks, the knees, the bones, the skin layers, the worn-out
Wrinkles and the sighing thighs.
I would picture their lengths dominated by the visibility of threads of cloths that
Are for some other woman in some other world.
I sit up and almost fall,
Then use the armchair to balance me as I mount onto the carpet,
Where I stand again and tremble.
I walk towards the bed,
Then turn around. I exit the bedroom.
I walk through the house and past the kitchen and enter
The bigger room with the chandelier and the grand piano.
There are picture frames in this room, but they do not show faces-
They only show sentences.
Scriptures,
and I ignore them, and sit myself at the grand piano.
Middle C has turned from the ivory color to
Brown. And I blow the dust away.
Ave Maria begins with the note G,
But I play the highest note on the set of keys
With my left hand,
Then roll across it one by one as if I'm playing an infinite scale.
And watch my fingers as they shake upon each valorous key.
'One, two, three' I whisper
Then play another note.
'One
Two
Three.'
I put my hands to my side then realize that there are tears rolling down my cheeks.
There is no window in this room,
I hum again and now it is the loudest sound in the house...
But it is still, oh so quiet.
The furniture in the room is all in standard condition,
As I stand up, I close my eyes and remember them without having to look at them.
As they are, as they have always been.
I walk to one of the walls that present four picture frames.
All of them show a man and a woman in each-
And all of them are blank.
There is a quote underneath one of them that reads, "The house must be tendered well-
for now home is where the heart is."
I read it out aloud, repeat it, then read it out a third time.
"If home is where the heart is," I then say, "then my heart must still be in July."
I look around...
"Last year."
This is my house... And it has not been tendered in a very long time.
I walk away from the wall again, face the piano,
Then walk out of the room and past the kitchen to the bedroom again.
There is a bathroom to the side, I remember,
I enter it and place myself fragilely at the sink and the mirror.
My face is in its center, and the tiles around of me create a green shade to my pale skin.
There is little hair left on my head, but I brush it away and look deeply into the shallowness
Of my eyes.
I hum again,
and I am echoed by the tiles of the bathroom walls.
But I am still oh so quiet. I hum louder.
Then I turn to the bathtub in the area of space in the corner of the bathroom.
There is still water inside of it from the previous day...or week.
I walk to it and realize that there are no windows in this room.
I enter the water, and sit in the bathtub.
The dress floats at the surface.
I am still humming.
I submerge my head within the water,
then bring it out after a few seconds.
I submerge it again and keep it in for longer,
then bring it out again.
I submerge myself within it again...
It is drastically cold and it's temperature permeates my bones and leaves me feeling
Bloodless.
The water enters my nose, my mouth, goes down my throat and suddenly,
I am out of it again and choking at the head of the bathtub.
I bring myself out of it, weakly and exasperated, onto the bathroom tiles.
I exit the bathroom and walk back into the bedroom.
I collapse onto the bed and then pull the sheets on top of my dried shaking body.
I exhale...
"The sheets used to love you." A voice in my head says.
"If you were to veil yourself every-night like a queen in marriage to a dead man,
Then no one would blame you for never actually showing yourself."
And I listen...
Then that is exactly what I do.
I think about the loss of my neurons,
Then append my thoughts to race under their sedatives as I pull the sheets around my entire body.
Eventually, I stop shaking.
But when I open my eyes, I realize that only my body has.
"I wonder how these memories would feel like," I whisper again,
"If they were in the mind of some other woman,
In some other world..."
I close my eyes,
I close my mouth,
And I go to sleep.

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.

There is no whiskey in his room tonight...

Instead,
There is a half-empty glass of-
Rock shandy, Pepsi-cola, Dr.Pepper,
Or something black.
Something minuscule,
even though he has not sipped from it.
He has not looked at it- his tongue
Was only dry for two minutes before he
Locked the door.
For the only presence that made it hard for him to swallow
Was in the form of something that he was still trying to release...
at 2AM.
Release at 2AM.
There is a typewriter in front of him and he is feeling as permeable as
The glass that is sitting next to it.
'as permeable if it had a closed lid made up out of carbon' he thinks.
'Closed lid', 'Carbon',
'Closed lid'
He does not know what to type.
As distance diminished it's existence throughout the years,
He began to realize that Letters were starting to transform themselves
Into Diary-Entries and vice-versa.
The art of belittling seclusion through the method of fictionalizing himself
Was turning more into a hobby than an art and
he did not know what to do except to accept it as a tragedy
That nobody else needed to know about.
"Tragedy:" he types.
"I don't know how to forget about you."
'And etcetera,' he thinks.
In his minds eye he sees a girl in a school far away.
She's holding a camera and a textbook and a picture of a boy
That isn't him.
She's walking into her new life and one day she will go a week without
Thinking about how it feels to know interest and feel it shared
from someone who thought it never existed.
One day she will go a week without thinking about the boy who stared at empty pages
And wrote letters about bitter meals that his tongue thought could never be tasted.
One day she will go a week with just the thought of how glamorous a life spent alone is...
Before she meets someone there...
Who will make her taste something that is less bitter than him himself.
'I hope that's where my story ends.' He thinks.
And then imagines himself embedded into
Dark bitter things.
(Tobacco, caffeine, dark chocolate.)
He sighs and stares at the words he has already typed.
He can imagine these bitter things spilling into his glass and changing its taste with each
little drop.
"You were dead to me before you even walked out of the door..." He decides,
And puts it onto the paper.
He lifts the glass and takes a sip and then puts it back down again.
'One day she will go a week without thinking about me..."  He thinks.
Release at 2AM.

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.

All of the routes have shown up around you and
Your suitcases are packed with
The scent of memories permeating the air.
You've put on your toughest coat and
Nostalgia will not let itself in
But, the more you look around and
the more you listen to the sounds
Being screamed around you
The more clearer it becomes that,
None of the routes are open for you.
None of the routes are open for you.
On the road that passed between escapism and development,
Someone forgot to tell you that
You can't make friends out of open rivers.
No matter how translucent the inlet,
No matter how unfathomable the depth,
No matter how elating the scent,
You can carry the stones before they're cast into the waters,
But,
You will only feel their heaviness,
When you are watching them float away from you.

I would like to describe my heartbreak.
But,often, the words are collective and too sullen.
They breed in herds, one after the other, and rip themselves to pieces like my thoughts commanded them to do so.

My mouth is a cavern,
And it holds vessels upon
What ideas have managed to
Escape it.
When they tell me to speak,
An abyss grows throughout its edges
And commands features of it to be
Progidies, of masterpieces that only
Hint up out of their true meaning.

The tongue within it shakes,
Often reminded with all I am
Combined with all that I fear.
The thoughts, they run away,
And, When they tell me to speak them
I collect only their memories,
Like they would leave an impression that counts as something meaningful.

I run away.
When they tell me to speak,
I am in the forest again,
I am watching the trees, the leaves,
And i am about to burn it to the ground.
I am holding the lighter, and they are calling out my name.
They are staring at me.
They are staring at me.
But still they call my name.
And my words are in a herd, collective and teeth-bared,
But I'll never open my mouth.
I will just leave the wolves growling within me.

When they ask me to speak, they will only hear their echoes.

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.