I know well enough,
How to play the game,
That I can blend in with the crowd.

I know what things
Should bring me shame
And which ought to make me proud.

I would be alert
-If not all the time,
For in the fog there’s much to miss.

And it’s only when
His eyes meet mine
That I fear the reaper’s kiss.

I can wear the face
I’m expected to,
And you’d never know it didn’t fit.

When I take it off,
As I’m apt to do,
I never quite know what to do with it.

It’s a social game,
As it’s always been.
It’s not the kind that you win or lose.

But the kind you play,
As light-hearted children,
Before you perceive any mountains to move.

I hear the talk,
“World’s getting meaner”.
And over decades, said over again.

But the grass has never
Really been any greener,
I think the shade was just different back then.

What destruction to my soul!

What life removed!

What right have I to sit here and feel nothing?
What chance?

The point of horrors past and future horrors dodged give no more comfort than does vindication.

I would be wrong to make it right.

What chance I’ll reach the end?

I am torrential.
I am still.
I am a haven, and a killing field.

What chance I’ll reach the end?

I am hot ash.
I’m far too cold.
I’m tarnished; I cannot be gold.

I could be a souvenir, but am a memory best lost.
A thorn in every side.
A coin once clutched, but best if tossed.
A condemned amusement ride.

What chance I’ll reach the end?

I’m shaken till I shatter.
I’m numb until I mend.
Shake and shatter.
Shake and shatter.
Shake and shatter; numb again.

What right have I to sit here and feel nothing?

What right?

What choice?

What chance?

Absolve me of my temperament.
Absolve me of my tears.
Dissolve my personality,
My vast, expanding fears.

Absolve misguided sentiments.
Forgive each frustrated flow.
Leave me unnoticed and unfettered.
Unchained. At peace. Alone.

Resolve my intuition,
And forgive hypocrisy.
Absolve me of my unseen sins,
And free me of belief.

Absolve my broken promises.
Absolve my broken mind.
Forgive me for my cruelties,
And for all imagined crimes.

Absolve me of my selfish wounds.
Ignore those that are not.
Absolve me of my slumber,
And of all that I’ve forgot.

Absolve me of vexation.
Forgive me, part of whole.
Absolve me of the darkness
That now lurks within my soul.

Dear Ethel Cain

Maybe I will come up with a song about my dying body that everyone except my brothers will sing to the same American bomb. Maybe then my mother will maybe then my father into the image designed by the non-working eye of god. And I won’t be touched in a bathroom and my cousins will outlive heaven in a patiently violent world of surrendering angels who surrender to themselves because their mirrors saw a sheep under an icicle and joined the suicide cult of sameness that went on to become the alcoholic white space that created heaven from nothing more than a nothing that added itself to a hell built on any toddler’s belief in offing oneself to get a nap. Gaze is a sec away from Gaza.

Dear Ethel Cain

I feel my death has passed away. That the golden comprehension of my shirtless youth has become touched out of its mind and into a code for unfinished nakedness. My god a scarecrow stuffed with snakeskin and my scarecrow a fetus trying to curl itself to life. I don’t think any of us are here. The pain of being is the pain of not having been. What a ******* thought. There are children who know the sky is a color made to scream at blue. And they die not because they are little.

I don’t stream a lot of TV
but once I’m in that mode, I’m down
and I can’t get up.

Best pickup line I heard this week:
“You could be my emergency contact.”

A girl recently called me “weird people.”
She was effusive and I was put in my place.
Apparently, good grammar isn’t legally enforceable.
Her friend apologized, saying—and wrote it down.
“She lives on her phone; it’s a claustrophobic place.”
“Ooo!” I’d said, "Can I use that?” She gave me a blank look.

Leong, lisa and I were walking to class when a lone goose flew over,
honking incessantly, like a New York taxi in heavy traffic.
“That must be a Canadian goose,” I said, because my uninformed comments seem forever welcome—and we are pretty far north.
“I know what it was saying,” Leong offered, in her most inscrutable Asian way. Lisa and I waited to hear some Chinese wisdom, but what she finally said was, “Where IS everyone? I knew I shouldn’t have stopped to ***.”

There’s a song that goes, “We got married in a fever.”
That line seems so point-on to me. That’s how it happens.
Not, “We got married with a prenup, hotter than a brussel sprout.”
My Grandmère told me Peter and I will need a prenup, if we ever…
.
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Songs for this:
Feather by Sabrina Carpenter [E]
Head In The Clouds by BabyJake
Jackson (feat. Josh Homme) by Florence + the Machine