under the sludge of this depression, I am awake. it’s morning outside but that doesn’t change a thing.

tiredness takes me to quiet places. I follow like I’m devout.

this forest is new. there’s a drumming of a heartbeat within the trunks of these trees.

it thrums under my fingertips. blood rushes forward to touch this rhythm.

songbirds nest, plume against plume for love and for rest. the birdsong is sweet as saccharine.

I taste the sap on my lips, its nectar, thick with agape. a salve for myriad laments under the roof of a single bell jar.

the indigo sky convulses, telling of fortunes. the clouds retch gilded roses.

blades of grass fence the circumferences of leaves in gypsy winds. the forest warms like a flame.

my body sways in solipsistic wonder. the crescents of my nails are crusted with lichen.

my limbs are drawn into its boughs, like gravity. like the bark is starved.

my mind is foliage and my crown is littered with inflorescence. my sky is finally cerulean and lilac.

each gall is an ancient hurt. each wound is a knot.

I breathe my mourning. I wait to bloom.

oh, lovely –

another of my ugly insecurities has come undone –

unraveling from my heart, tumbling across the space between us,

ungainly in its amble towards your feet.

if i’m sorry, will that be too little? if i perform an even bigger act of affection

(not always only for compensation)

will that be too much?

was it too much the last time?

as you watch me scramble for words, for explanations,

for comprehension of my own actions,

are you sick of me?

does it make your stomach turn to see my flaws? it sure does make mine.

i can’t tell you 𝘪 𝘸𝘢𝘴𝘯'𝘵 𝘢𝘭𝘸𝘢𝘺𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 without lying

that 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘭𝘪𝘬𝘦, 𝘪 𝘸𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥.

anyway, would you like some tea while we watch this show?

this tragedy of errors on an endless timeline?

anything else to make your experience better?

am i condescending when i ask for concern? is it fun to battle my quiet anger with your quiet neglect?

i’m sorry, maybe i assume too much. actually, i’m sure i do.

it’s so humiliating to find meaning in everything even when i know better.

oh, lovely –

yet another insecurity.

lately, my answer to anything just seems to be

“i don’t know”

and when i reach out to the mirror,

my hands goes through and i can’t feel the person on the other side,

as if the twenty years or so that i survived

don’t mean anything to Reality.

and i want to fight back, you know

fight for my place, for my heartbeat

but how many battles can you wage,

and how many battles can you win

for a cause you no longer believe in?

i don’t know.

i think about bodies a lot,

and how clothes are so burdened with the task of

covering such substantial skeletons, such important skin,

as if they could ever veil

the blood that pulses in You.

Your body amongst orchids,

decomposing ever so slightly in the purple darkness of night:

a night that we do not possess

but it takes over us so completely in its solitude.

i hate that word.

i hate the entire farce of it all.

i’m not okay alone

you aren’t, either

and so isn’t anybody i’ve ever known,

but we keep dancing to this charade –

this pitiful masquerade

of independence and self-sustenance.

i don’t know.

i think what i’m trying to say is

you only know permanence when someone you love

becomes someone you used to love,

and the life that you’re breathing (but they aren’t),

the life that you’re breathing on borrowed time,

is suddenly so endless

so hollow

because it’s me without You:

echoes of a voice that always comes around somehow empty.

and i’m tired of opening at the close,

a futile juxtapose,

only because i won’t allow myself to admit

that nothingness exists when i’m without You.

this is my introduction to something i never wanted to make up

something that needs makeup

to hide all the rust it built up

in the winds of an apocalyptic sky

see, there i go again, with the same jargon, the same death-comes-for-all

i’m so sick of my own talk

i’m so thirsty for new words that don’t sound like mine

for words that don’t find ****** rhymes

for voices that don’t herald the end of days

because my eyes don’t see what’s really real

they’re seeing only what is metaphorical

what is above is not a stalagtite sky

and what is between my toes isn’t the smell of rot

and my flesh is not actually decaying

the way i feel my soul has been

see, i started out trying not to be me

to conjure something that changes me

but this identity comes down like a deadweight

tied around my straining neck

screaming in my ears, words

words in my head, it’s all too much

it’s all too real

get out

I think of you on days the odor of water makes me dry-heave.

Our photographs still throw me, offguard, into flashbulb memories. Every detail etched into my brain with a hot scalpel.

This isn’t an apology, this is a confession. I am not guilty in my eyes.

That was my hollow lava, this is what it crystallized into. Look at it, laugh at it, break it, keep it. My words were only meant to be beautiful in someone else’s eyes. In your eyes.

Drown my breath in a tub of sand, tell me everything that isn’t alright.

You can weave our veins into a dystopian novel, stamp it with 'fiction' and we can pretend it never happened.

The ordinary incinerated in your palms and I’m reeling from this hamartia.

Paint your carcinogens on my skin, carve them into my bones, punch them onto my eyes. Hold these hands one more time and feed me a blatant lie.

Feed me anything that’ll help me swallow these choked up cries.

I’ve wondered how the others were, how you were.

Was it art when you wrapped blindfolds around their necks?

What was it to them? How were they dying?

How am I dying?

Because I wake up in the odd hours, my chest feeling like it’s soaked in salt water,

and you’re standing at the edge of my bed,

with a mug of poison,

smiling,

telling me it’s okay,

it’s just a bad dream,

here, I made some coffee.

And I believe you.

So convinced that this is the end,

You tore through turbulent existence;

Your sentences, all past tense.

What is foe was once a friend,

Yet, you seek rhetoric arguments

And metaphors that never make sense.

Some crazy paradox? – If I can comment,

Your presence was always permanent.

The madness brimmed and quickly spilled

Actions of mindlessness – impulse -

Jumped the cliff, the water repulsed

Skull against stone, drilled.

While the gulls cried out grim lullabies,

Your soul fell through the punctured skies.

the skies have poured out their blue

and something about the way they do

reminds me of what I did to you.

but you knew I was no good;

you’d felt it on my skin and in the hollows of my knuckles,

as if my words weren’t enough.

the going always gets tough –

this chronic rollercoaster, where neither of us

can hang on until the end of the ride,

this terrible love we keep walking,

you’re stumbling and I’m never talking

I don’t know what it means anymore.

it’s just us on the kitchen floor

wondering which was deadlier:

the knives or the fire.

we’ll pretend I’m not a liar

and that you’re not losing this game –

anything that helps you keep sane.

your blood terrarium, my empty echoes

this codependent existence so shallow;

only killing time,

only killing what you wish could be mine.

I think I made you up inside my head and gave you a name so you’d come alive. I put mirrors behind your eyes to see them shine. I built a fire under your skin to feel the warmth that I could never find. I saved electricity for your fingertips and poison for your lips and a metronome for your heart.

I made you up inside my head, I gave you life in my heart, I made you real with wishes.

But nobody as beautiful and destructive as you can survive a resurrection only conjured of dreams, and so you let me go.

Silenced.

Woven black, woven dark.

An evening of sepia hiding behind brown curtains.

Warm fingers sliding against the cold of the tall window.

Warm breath condensing into fogs of horror on the cold pane.

Strained eyes glancing at the cloth doll, lying like a carcass on the glass table.

“It’s okay to hate,” she consoles herself, her childish voice trembling in her delicate throat.

Strained eyes blinking to focus, the doll lying like a carcass on the glass table.

Warm breath escaping in laborious attempts through her thin lips.

Warm fingers precariously gripping two slender needles.

An evening of sepia peeping through the curtains.

Woven black, woven dark.

Pierced.

What was it about omnipresence that appealed to me

so much that I destroyed myself -

one mountain at a time, one boundary at a time -

until the alarms stopped going off at breaches?

The magpies don't sing when they're sad, so what am I

when I laugh at myself for crying?

Who am I looking for when my pillows waft voiceless lullabies

from a bed half-empty? (half yours, half mine,

and I don't know which one's missing.)

What was it about hedonism that disgusted me

so much that my body rejected kindness -

every peace offering, every affectionate touch -

until it could no longer hold itself together?

Metaphors, like escaped prisoners, running for a life anywhere that isn't here,

anywhere that isn't me,

and I fold and break into myself

in muted, nondescript implosions.

white surfaces flash in fluorescent lighting –

this is no opus, heaving on cold bathroom tiles,

blood and grain against porcelain,

convulsing creature in all its grotesque obloquy:

bleary and snotting. four-walled, windowless, antiseptic vivarium;

life crawls outside. it thrives, it devours, it fortifies.

inside, here, it repulses. ****** effluvium of all kinds.

sharp shrieks of skin across glossed floor, tears soak

before the cliff of the jaw. nothing stays.

wiping drool off the sterile sink and sweat off my knotted back.

snarls choking into sobs, sobs gasping for air.

this is no opus; blackening from corners,

the repugnant vignette held between fingernails –

for the contagious odium of the resigned abhorrent

bleeds and drips and stains.

neglect and rejection strewn like pearls,

pearls, worth nothing, feeling everything.

a fly buzzes in the stark fluorescent light,

and blackness climbs in. blackness consumes.

you drink from your tall glasses, a toast to lives you barely touched.

we do not care for the river of words that rush from your mouth.

we have no use for eulogies underground.

only what you sow you can reap, your nothingness begets nothingness.

we who lay among the roots

do not see the cyanotype sky behind your rouged liquors.

we look below for asphodels to sate a hunger that has no pulse or palate.

Lethe consumes our memories from seeping water.

we talk to shadows without light. we do not bear the stains of summer.

there is no loss when there's nothing to keep.

we who lay among roots

know who we are when separated from you.

your draughts of grenadine are no more than a euphemism

for how we breathe the crimson seeds that keep us under.

Amy speaks to me sometimes,

reminds me of the losing game that I’m playing:

I’ve put in all my coins, gambled all I could call mine

and she shakes her head but keeps her silence.

There are no rules, she knows this

it’s all in or nothing,

and she watches me give everything.

I resurrect every ghost to make me bleed,

and tear open this skin for meaning,

but what is the value of hollowed bones and haunted dreams?

How many revolutions until your words lose your voice?

How many revolutions until the sun burns my hands away from your eyes

so you can finally see the light?

I lost the heart in a wager for yours

only to return with empty palms

and another phantom shackled in the mind

that patrols the lock-up, and the whip comes down

at every clink of ball-and-chain – no prisoner stands a chance to escape.

How odd that every lash on the prisoner,

you’ll find on my wrist, on my back, on my neck;

how odd that every movement is a punishment;

how odd that you don’t see the manacles

I’ve bound myself with.

Half a century and two score

Knocking on absent heaven’s door

Everything’s perpetual, don’t you know

The gate you seek was locked long ago

My four-walled poison

Your bloodshot lung

These iron bars

Rust and mud.

Bed-bitten skin and calloused fingertips

Where is your God?

"If you'll make me up, I'll make you." - Virginia Woolf


How much of who we are are just stories? How much of you is made up in my head and how much of my flesh is your fabric? It reverberates between the cells of our bodies (our prisons): an entity that eludes definition and strings a cosmos betwixt our ends. In your silvery light, you are the moon and in my eyes, you are transcendental.

I know that only light makes you real. My mind brims with sunshine and it makes you sing, it makes you shimmer. Such ephemeral glory we held in our hands, beheld in our sights.

We shift in space; faraway glints of reflections. You flicker on your lonesome, your ashes I cannot douse with my sadness. Feverish at fingertips, I draw sigils to trap you in my mind. Phosphorescent and bleeding, as if anything could ever escape the damage from our names.

Winter's early dusk sinks around us. It's so cold and you're so warm, I know I'd go anywhere with you.

But we ruin too easy. I see you in the reflections of my mind, separating your image from who you really are. Everything I touch becomes surreal but here you are, still the same. A prosaic body that learned to glimmer in my light, still lunar in your way. There's nowhere to dive when you're only a surface, I can't peel at layers that don't exist.

In this gloaming, you can now see the light. In this gloaming, I now see your void.

I never thought about love when I thought about home. never felt the pulse of it.

the sun kisses my side of the planet but never touches my skin. I try to twist the knife inside me,

write lines that gut and bleed

but not every lived moment draws pain and demands witness. not every morning

clothes itself in deep indigo and creeps in on lithe legs to sit on my chest. my breath

no longer entwines with yours — you with your feet on the ground,

rhymes and rhythms are all the same to you. you move like you know you belong,

like the very air around you

rushes to meet your limbs. and yours met mine with a reverberating heartbeat.

I tell you I never think about love when I think about home, but

to me there is no difference between going home and rushing across the state to you.

and when they start to pull apart, both moving in opposing orbits

your corner of the planet a stranger to my house,

I’ll call you, listen to your voice wax poetic about new love,

and in the silence that follows I’ll ask you,

“Is it cold there, too?”

I once dreamt that there were nails in my forearms,

from the soft inside of my elbow to the thin skin around my wrist,

and someone pulled them out one by one.

my blood was deep crimson and thicker than honey, but there was no pain.

I wonder if I’m really living when I’m not enduring excessive hurt;

I wonder at how so many lights don’t seem to lift the blackness.

beckoned by fire and sadness,

even Syl broke trying to be her own. how can I make it?

it gets difficult exactly when it needs to be easier.

more dissatisfied with the silence than I’ve ever been before

but the words I say don’t rustle the quiet either.

I know my epitaph would read:

“I was nothing more than this.”

I even know exactly what my hell would look like,

a brimful and just a little more, sensory rapture of the silliest kind.

why don’t I change? why is the same sky above me and the same gloom in my throat?

there’s so much I wish I was but will never be.

only I remain, always –

an outcome unpleasant and undesired, but the only outcome that has ever been.

only I remain.

I'm here once more, but then again when was I not?

as if my eyes have ever shifted from my reflection. I'm sick of it.

I don't know how long I've been here; this dimly lit trap gives away no time.

all else melts around me, pools into ripples of my distorted reality.

I sit and I watch my face. I long for the familiarity of yesteryears that I cannot trace.

my skin yawns open, wills to consume itself - porous, velutinous, and brittle.

this is who I am, this is what I see:

tyrian purple flesh decomposing, falling inside my bones that split and splinter;

my mind climbing out of my head, fugitive from the skull's prison;

breaths, ribbons of grotesque, not deep enough to last and not shallow enough to be numbered.

everything without is human (decaying though it is), and everything within is dissimulation.

this molten, fragmented un-being doesn't escape my sight. these eyes have cried out for respite -

and yet they exist, the odd and sole constant in the mirror before them -

wistful for oblivion and feasting on fear. what's gone has kept me alive for longer than it appears.

this body doesn't even feel real. my fingertips burn at every touch.

what more shrapnel does this heart desire until it plays out its final beat?

the people around me,

i’ve seen them shedding skin like it’s so natural, so human;

as if growing was as simple as breathing,

as if your reflection was never supposed to show you

struggling to stay inside your body

as if you didn’t belong inside of you.

as if you could grow with your body,

unlike the bones i wore on my exterior.

maybe that’s why, of late, i haven’t been feeling human at all.

maybe that’s why growing feels so much more

like breaking this exoskeleton that refuses to acquiesce,

refuses to let me get out of this unscathed.

it leaves me ravenous and pathetic.

my skin wanting to consume Your flesh was no act of romance,

but a denial of who i am.

this calling, this crepuscular craving of identity

caves its way into my conscience.

for i have words that come by every some time,

knocking, begging to be let in,

but there’s no keyhole in my door and the **** lost its will so long ago.

moments past the gloam,

a nocturnal sacrifice,

i moult until the shards of dawn cut away

at the failure of synthesizing a decorous skeleton,

at the loathing that follows the inadequacy of my individuality,

at the wounds of dissension,

and i am left

asphyxiated, bleeding, catatonic,

with the grief of old bones broken, just like the new will break again

tomorrow.

I’ve begun to hate the whole ‘I contain multitudes’ idea.

I hate every breath I have taken since I was twelve, I hate how I’ll never be okay with who I am, and I hate how this concept of containing multitudes means there’s more about myself that I will uncover and hate, again.

I hate how your curtains are chrome yellow, I hate how it spills sunlight on the scattered prints on your bedsheets that I’ve come to hate. I hate how my feet are either too cold outside, or too hot under the blanket, I hate how my neck both desires and dislikes pillows. I hate how I am never comfortable with comfort: I hate how your fingers pressing between my shoulder blades don’t relax me. I hate that I can only love if I hold it up against all that I hate.

I hate how I lie with your arm beneath my head and my mind just above it, thinking of all the things that I hate and how I never hated you. I hate how I write about you, how I hide it from you. I hate how I never said these things to you. I hate how I hate myself but never hesitate to glorify you.

I hate how I say things to make you despise me, how I twist your words to despise you, how I set us on fire and wanted you to save just me.

How delusional of me to want to worship every inch of your skin with my lips. How delusional of me to want to be divine and not lowly, to love and not to ravage.

How delusional of me to love when I can only hate.

moribund,

I’m just like what one of the Bronte’s said –

'down to that tomb already more than mine!'

but it’s you on the trolley, the metal just as cold as your skin.

how close were we to this end

and for how long did we walk this wire?

lost and deserted each, neither better than the other.

how long did we swear by denouement

before you gave in and claimed it as your own?

I was and will always be light years, light years away from you.

now I tie your toes together, no ghost could compare with the haunting

of you and your memory:

stains of summer and bruises of promises

in a bed still half empty –

half yours, half mine,

and your half is now missing.

the shoulders are the dampest,

soaked with exchanged comfort and bittersweet grief.

amidst the mourning there’s always the systematical process of the farewell –

the only way to guide us to the true end.



we do it with fire

to purify, to cleanse, to return to dust.



we kindle affections, relations, intentions,

and nurture a flame that always grows out of control,

leaving loss and lament to burn our hearts.



condolences blur into a soft hum,

nothing unites us in our differences but

sometimes it only takes the pathos of cremation to realize that

ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

I always walk into social settings not knowing the right way to smile.

the last time I was out, it was a funeral

where uncles and fathers waited for the body quietly,

where mothers and aunts divided their time

sizing up every girl who walked in fresh,

evaluating the contents of moroseness on her face.

did her nail paint make her look well-maintained

and yet purposefully unaware of her manicure?

her clothes, were they the right balance of panache and mourning?

and what about her mannerisms? is she polite and demure,

is she the girl next door? is she an acquaintance? is she family?

well, if she is, why isn’t she in the right colours?

how bold of her to wear eyeliner!

her mother ought to have taught her these things.

cue scrutinizing the parent, the birth giver:

at least she’s wearing white clothes. her fingernails are light pink?

eyebrows rise up in the odd combination of judgement, approval , and the tiniest hint of contempt.

the grandmothers come out from the woodwork

because their experience and expertise in death is unparalleled by the young:

they seize responsibility of the rituals,

tutting at the slightest deviations of the routine they’re well-versed in.

what a business they make of death.

the loss isn’t theirs to feel, the life isn’t theirs to grieve.

‘the head faces the north, the toes to the south! don’t spill the grains unevenly! come, let me tilt open the mouth so you can quench the thirst of the dead with holy water.’

they know it all, those devious grown-up so-and-so’s. we’re still too alive for their acquiescence. they’re so assured in their rites, they’d take over from you at their own deathbed.

they’re watching you very closely, don’t you forget.

they’re not here for the deceased, they’re here to inspect.

I stay under the radar with my tight-lipped smile,

they may not live for too long, but I’ll be here for a while.

blinded and uncomfortable,

once by lies and fear, now decrepit

the stem running up my back and

its wretched and cursed flower

wilt sixfold ever since the thunder,

the lightning that you unleashed on me,

stolen rouge, broken plumbing -

trying to be more than the damage you left behind.

no butterflies for this mess

conquered and destroyed by downpour, sunburst;

only a mouth full of ocean -

shuddering waves towards the blood moon -

and the remnants of your solipsism

more real to me than my own beating heart.

now, blinded by formal realism and your belligerence,

crimson clouds against inevitable death,

i know you can now see the light

no blades you need to hurt me

no delicately decaying words of devotion

for i always begin with you

and then diverge, disintegrate;

a mockery, mayhem, a survivor of bedlam

could i ever be more than the damage you left behind?

when you agonized over bed sheets and bedpans,

the drip of the IV and the trip of your heartbeat,

the messages (or lack thereof) that you received and the faces you had to greet,

the sweet, un-soothing words of sorrow spoken over your head,

what did you believe heaven would be?

did the crusted blood on your stitches burst forward like coral?

and your bruises, did they blossom into crocuses -

the violent violet of careless injections and the yellow-green of chemotherapy nausea?

what about your articulate thoughts, the ones under your sunken skull?

surely they went out the window only to perform sun dance amidst

the snowdrops at the end of your winter.

when you agonized over your will and your will to fight,

the house-turned-mausoleum and the North-less children,

what did you believe heaven would be?

even when I was little I had a hard time leaving wounds alone —

the absent-minded uprooting of scabs and the slow flame of revived pain.

to bleed in so many small ways, to be so oblivious to being real.

if only they were tiny sacrifices, tiny offerings to whoever dealt out hurt and sadness, if only they were enough to keep my nose above water.

I find myself lost within four walls in more ways than one.

they say you should smoke sage in all your corners,

smudge its grey into the darkness. they say it puts the past to rest.

I burn leaves and I burn grass and I burn letters and thoughts and touches and it makes me blacker, blacker, blacker.

the remains of grief wait, latched shut in its music box. I can’t bear its singing. I can’t tear this flesh off my bones. I can’t make myself fiction.

but you did. you did and now I fade into a ballad not even worth its weight in the heartbreak it rhymes.

to have sought poetry only to plummet into misery. to have the currency of my decomposing tongue and no concoction of words to soothe the damage.

the rot runs deep. the rot is real. the rot is all I feel.

you’re all the lives kept out of my reach

since I only ever saw fish being sold

on planks covered with tarp or on ice beds in fancy stores,

I only found sorrow in the purchase of their deaths.

how we use one life to sustain another,

breeding and farming existences only for slaughter.

I go back to one memory, one that I observe in every light:

a glass tank on a slab of dark marble,

half full of salty water and crowded with salmon,

and the rising panic as they darted in their prison

as one man scooped out one mug full of water after another

and drained it on the sidewalk.

something so profoundly helpless and sadistic in that action:

the life force of a being discarded like garbage

right in front of their eyes.

their kin, laid out right beside them,

tarp on plank on bricks and stones,

slits in their flesh to increase the appeal

of what their bodies had to offer.

how much like life was that one memory –

moment after precious moment

taken away by people, disposed of by time,

until we lie, facing up, eyes swimming in their sockets

as our last breath leaves our corpse.

I never wanted to write bitterly about you.

I promised this to myself long ago but in light of life and in dark of hopelessness,

what ground does my promise hold?

and yet I keep it, like I kept all the other vows I made to you.

we start learning the alphabet around the age of 2

but it’s been over two decades since and somehow ‘I’ still comes after you.

over two decades and somehow the same alphabet still fails me;

did I learn differently than everyone I knew?

how am I grasping at straws,

at words,

and coming up with nothing?

he sings ‘I’m losing my baby on promises kept’

and I’m thinking of how I missed out on the day they taught that

‘I’ always comes before you.

the earth around my skin is more

home than home could have ever been.

my sinking fingertips cut and

bleed into the soil, bleed into

prayers that flash red

on your face and in

my sight. no sea monster could rise

in these black bottomless eyes; the

songs choke themselves to the blue of

our forgotten ghosts - the ghosts of

loss who have forgotten to haunt,

to be real outside of our

abandoned relics, outside our

destitute, neglected bodies.

got into my seat, took on the highs and lows

the same way that we all go

scooting over for whoever joined the ride

(and the ride was better with you by my side

we climbed up into the sky and the stars

me with my words and you with your guitar

the descend seemed to last forever, although

when we went back down, we found it was never so

you stopped the wheel, got down, and it never started again)

waiting for the motions to bring the night to an end

going to take all the highs and lows as I go

(looking for an answer to a question you’ve always known)

when time starts to spin (when you can also see the light

will I shift when, once more, I find you by my side?)

I scrape the crust at the folds of your reflection.

it’s dismaying to know we’ve to retire yet another door.

I keep tasting grey everywhere I go. I wish something would surprise me.

every day blends into the next,

a cocktail with no flavour but plenty of potency,

drowning memory and time into glasses of obsolescence.

so I go on burying my ichor in dirt.

you, in your temperamental Lethe —

you can mourn your loss and

you can lash your back in repentance and

you can swear you’ll never let your heart beat in your hands again and

you can swallow each year of sorrow like a bitter pill and

you can chase it with the poison of amnesia to **** the ghosts of loss and

I will stay on my toes because hope is petulant

and she knows how to resuscitate the dead

even when lungs and worlds collapse.

I’ve lived in goodbyes for long enough to know their taste in words

but you never let me kiss them off your lips so I’ll breathe —

and I’ll hope that hope does what she can.

“so…how long do I have to be in my head for this one?…oh, alright. that doesn’t help at all.”

I guess you never asked for it, or even stuck around to find out

how you brought me to my knees only to make me fall apart

how obscene to want to be seen

after years spent watching over you

opening all the doors you closed on me silently

making mistakes like you made our bed

and tucked me in like your long-lost child

how long I waited in the middle of it all, the walls crumbling

the ceiling pushing down, sitting on my chest

every gasp forced into empty song you’d never play to me

your other foot already across the threshold

you made a slow disaster out of me

what of this disappointment? what of the echoes in my head?

you don’t pack those up

erase, erase

slam down on the backspace

turning over a brand new page

no lines you left to retrace

when did this become a wild goose chase?

I turn people around and see blank faces

I drain my veins and lay to waste

draw the curtains

dim the lights

goodbye.