my breaths
your breaths
and two heart beats pulsing in the quiet grey atmosphere
pavement
soil
and two hands intertwined at night
and all i can think is that instead of lying on top of it, i would rather be buried
beneath it.

i think in puddles of oil, slick and polluting
when i speak it comes out as smoke
negative thoughts inhabiting negative people
i heard that secondhand smokers have it worse

i am okay with becoming another statistic
"a growing symptom of the world's disease"
-- as they put it
they can use my sleep as a method of change, as long as i don't wake to see it

in the morning, i sit in the quiet hallways and drown myself in music
because if i don't, i don't know which way is up and which direction is right
but why does it matter?
i always think right is left and i pronounce my words wrong and they say it's okay to make
mistakes but don't you dare make a B

i think about sitting on the edge of a nebula as it's forming,
watching things so much bigger than you and i take place
but we began there too

sometimes i think about the fact that time is a manmade concept
so i can't waste time or spend time
when it isn't real
so i can't give my time back to the universe
to keep the stars turning
instead of me breathing

sometimes i think that maybe if i am mean to everyone i care about,
they will leave
and i can stop worrying that they were like you
and never cared in the first place.

the class i don't cry in is the class i do the worst in and if that
doesn't say something
then i don't know what does.

you told me i was special.
who were you talking about?
you said that we would never amount to anything
and you yell
and you refuse to understand
and i could never tell you that those pictures are not of me
and that i don't want to be good at math
and that i want to crawl inside my own skin and hibernate until my cells dry

but it's okay because my dad said there's nothing wrong with me