i feel myself in gradual decay with all these hoarded sorrows: a bad habit i inherited from my mom, embellished with my own kind of crazy, my own kind of lonely. my own kind of wasting away. i am half a sigh away from breaking. i am half a word away from being the next dead poet. how can some things, so small, carry such gravity? how can some things, so unremarkably quiet, carry something as heavy as my weighted skin, something as breakable as my resigned bones?

i have written so many poems; out they flow so heavily. out they flow like liquid lead. yet i remain full. i remain immovable. i remain a contradiction. i feel myself in gradual decay, unrelenting. in place. in the agony of total awareness.

and the air remains heavy — it remains heavy with all of me.