Struggling to focus and get **** done.

Realising just how necessary it is I slow down, ease up. My body is crying out for rest. Soon, I tell it, me, us - soon.

A body fractured, pulled in so many directions, dizzying speeds and gasping for air. Carnival rides but I'm too winded to scream, eyes ******* shut with sensory overload of mind and world.

I demand different. Deserve. I deserve different.

Work when I can. Time off when I need. From now on I build my plans with intention, with rest at the core, enrichment and nourishing takes precedence.

It's the only way I'll cope.

Kindness and long deadlines, slowness and focused activities. Soft soft soft. Lavendar and cotton. Nature to heal. Until I can breathe without panic pounding my chest, laundry lists crowding my throat, I wind back everything else.

I have to live to succeed. And that life I mapped just now is lush with opportunity - focus on care and community over arbitrary Winner goalposts or ingrained capitalist mentalities.

Soft, slow, intentional, communicative, unapologetic, peaceful, at home, in community, divine.

This is how I live now.

Only words of angst and longing bring me comfort, if a chest ripped open can be soothing - proof of life is a relief, I suppose. You couldn't feel this pain when you're dead.

Devouring digital pages of tension and tears, with sure-fire happy endings, or at least compatible melancholy. What a relief it must be to have life's plan ready written. The monotony a balm for frazzled nerves, torn lips, raw knuckles.

Tides are changing and the moon's pull draws breath from my lungs, refilling my body, bouyant

And as I lie there in the achingly frigid water I am overwhelmed by the exhaustion barely kept at bay, sinking

Pausing for a moment opens the floodgates and I am pulled downward as the weight of my world pins me to the floor, stagnant

How much longer can I continue this path of distraction, ruining myself from inside out, purging only the scantest of my full grief, simmering

It won't take much more to topple this body of cards, no tarot reading necessary to define my tears, flooding

Crying on the toilet counts as writing
much like scripting music videos on rainy bus rides home are artistic accolades to mount on the wall.

What is a personality but inorganic reproductions of wit, obsession, acceptable ugliness and socially-prescribed diminishment of all that does not glitter?

Tweets act as building blocks for political ideology
Brightened, tweaked squares filter through Instagram's grid of preset beauty and interest
Connections manufactured in nostalgia-tinted Facebook posts
Validation turned numerical, gameified: contingent on algorithmic recognition of human need for intimacy and acceptance

Songs of the past
Reverberate
Echoing through my skin
Ripples of memory and dream and fantasy
Child wonder and hope and promise and faith
Marrying villains in storybooks
With historical figures still living
Present, ominous, oppressive
Crushing guilt
Shame

Languid kisses leave me satin and desperate
to crawl into your mouth
make a blanket of your tongue
lay tokens of my favour by your molars

Your hand's on my hip and
all I can think is how safe I will feel
beneath your collarbone

Legs intertwined with duvets and soft hums, satisfaction
your ribcage dances with my fingertips
as I envisage burrowing deep in the cavity which holds you
up, together, grounded.

That seems the spot for me-
inside you, part of you, never without you
so desperate and desolate in life
except with you
utterly a part of me, so fundamental to my own existence
what power you have, what destruction you might release, what trust I give completely

My heart slips out back under my shoulder blade, desperate to avoid sinking or being ****** through curled cage and sternum plate