We can be as sick as clocks some days,
Our arms and legs ticking, and our frames sweating to break the fever down into something better understandable,
Each eye drifting back and forth,
Our mouths singing out sad songs every hour on the hour,
At what point does it become too much, I wonder

What are we made of? Are we wooden,
crafted out of beautiful trees from somewhere,
Or are we plastic, made in an assembly line,
and if so, who’s sweat was put into us?

Which room of the house are we put into?
In the living room, where everyone spends their time looking at us?
Or in the bathroom, where it’s just one set of eyes watching us at a time?
Or maybe we’re moved around a lot, with a million different eyes on us, never content with our placement

And are our batteries changed? Are we kept up with?
When will we need to depend on others to tell us what time it is?
Or will we all one day become ruined with battery acid?

And when we one day are no longer able to muster up the gears to make ourselves the sons and daughters of the eyes that watch us, where will we go?

It’s 3:30am and I’m finally laying down to sleep,
After tucking in all of the words I’ve been saving up for you,
They’re pretty restless, and I am too,
But don’t worry, I have a night light plugged in for them, they’re scared of the dark just like you were,
It’s a shame that you won’t be here to hear them in the morning,
They’d probably go well with sunlight through the windows and scrambled eggs,
And nothing would beat them rolling out of my mouth through the steam of the coffee I’d brew for you, for us

And don’t you wish we were still as beautiful as we were when we were born wrapped in stars and bathed in sunlight?

Before the smoke got to us and the mirrors became cracked,
Way back before our mothers and fathers were worried about us,
Before we’d spend too much time trying to read between the lines of each other’s books,
Now we hardly have time to read the sparknotes

And don’t you miss it? When we were able to fall asleep every night without pills,
And waking up every morning without missing someone was easy

What kind of monsters we have become to deny ourselves

I know you will never be around again to hear any of this, and

I’ve written this poem a hundred times over but there is still no one around to tell me that it won’t help me, so I’ll keep writing it

I know when you lick your lips you can still ******* sadness

I know this because when I lick mine I can still taste yours

A mixture of honey and heartbreak

Sometimes thick, sometimes runny

But still there nonetheless

And I know it isn’t going anywhere for either of us

But it’s important to enjoy it before it’s gone

Yeah, it hurts, but it’s so sweet

I could kiss your body so hard my nose bleeds

Or we could stay up for weeks and find each other’s tongues on the back of our teeth

Whatever makes us comfortable enough

And we will feel sorry for ourselves because our bodies do not know where to go now,
We are just ghosts without a set of bones to haunt,
And when the sirens sound and everyone is boarding the emergency boats, we will not move,
And we will sink with the ship,
And we will float to the bottom of everything

Weren’t we so beautiful then, when our eyes could burn holes into the sun,
When our tears could grow gardens,
And weren’t we so indifferent to sadness then,
I can still see the look on your father’s face, a decade ago, when he was holding you in that photograph,
Everything around you was like a wildfire,
And I would still welcome the burns with open arms because I know heartbreak gives way to success regardless, I just wish success meant a way to not be forgotten

We are so busy mending our brokenness that we forget to love one another,
And we are guilty by association to the circumstances we create for ourselves,
Strangers,
I never thought I’d feel this much for a stranger,
I never thought that we’d be strangers,
I’m just glad we had plenty of time to eat our hearts out

And I’m sure there are wine bottles in my kitchen for every letter in your name and I am sure that I could drink all of them and still remember your name,
And I will bury your memories inside of someone else and I am sure they will be just like you

We hold onto things even when they’re long gone,
We hold onto the familiarity because we do not want to go through a grieving process,
We do not want to cry, alone,
So we will latch onto every hymn and memory possible just to feel nostalgic and sorry for ourselves, and we will cry, even long after the grieving process has passed

I carry crystals around my neck and in my pockets when I walk because often I talk to myself and often I talk to the dead,
Often I am so confused that I do not know the difference between the two,
But I like that,
It leaves a sense of mystery to everything my mind has already planned out for me

I want to know where we all were when the world ended,
Who were we with, what were we doing, and were our hearts as full as they could be,
I stay up late at night sometimes and I just sing as loud and as long as I can, hoping that maybe possibly whatever creator is awake will hear me and keep me company, and not care who’s side I’m on,
I just want to be able to feel something for free

I do not want to keep sacrificing myself for heartbreak, and I wish I was ignorant to everything, I just want to know what it feels like to not know any better, about anything

I write these because I am hurting and I have yet to find a solution, and I am too broke for therapy, but I promise you I would pay dearly

Stressed mother to overwhelmed son,
“You look really tired today”

Overwhelmed son to stressed mother,
“I just haven’t been able to sleep well lately, but I am okay”

Empty beer bottle to overwhelmed son’s mouth,
You will drink me until you cannot feel anything else,
Cigarette ad to overwhelmed son,
It would be so easy for you to love my smoke again,
Overwhelmed son,
“I will get through this, even if it kills me one day”

Overworked father to overwhelmed son,
“You haven’t left your bed besides work, and even when you come home, the first thing you do is go to bed, and I am worried about you”

Overwhelmed son to overworked father,
“I just haven’t been able to sleep well lately, but I am okay”

I just haven’t been able to sleep well lately,
But I am okay

Education to overwhelmed son,
Your debt is heavier than the world and you will be paying for the things you haven’t learned for the rest of your life,
Overwhelmed son,
Everything is as heavy as the world, and I will break and get crushed until my body is sand on the beaches of the oceans I’ll never get the chance to visit

When I was 5 years old I visited Disney World, and the fireworks there burned brighter than anything I had ever seen before,
When I was 16 years old, I was burning bridges and cigarettes until I could no longer cross relationships and friendships and no amount of nicotine could make my lungs happy enough

But I will slip, and I will still burn, and I will never learn how to swim, and my lungs stopped knowing happiness when I breathed in anxiety and exhaled depression,
When I stopped breathing in oxygen and replaced it with fire, when I stopped exhaling full breaths and started exhaling as little as I could,
I don’t want to pass out, I want to keep as much as I can because I know I will never get it back  

And I will be alone in this because I have forgotten how to trust,
And I will live like this until I can no longer trust myself

Overwhelmed son to worried mother and father,
“I just haven’t been able to sleep well lately, but I am okay”

*I just haven’t been able to sleep well lately, but I am okay

Lately, I’ve been waking up every morning at 8am like clockwork, with tears in my eyes and on my cheeks, clawing their way out of my face like they’re running from something,
And a sense of panic that I can only describe as seeing an animal in your car’s headlights but not being able to slow down quick enough

Do you understand, how ******* disgusting it is to not feel like you’re able to write anything until everything feels like it’s on fire, and your only way of putting it out is to cough up a bunch of metaphors and hope they’re wet enough

Sometimes when I get really anxious I like to take road trips,
And when I’m driving,
I like to close my eyes,
Just so I can remember what it’s like to not possibly have any control of anything

Sometimes when I get really anxious, I try to recite the alphabet backwards,
Just so I can remember what it’s like to be able to forget something

Sometimes, it feels like I’ve been taking the wrong medicine at the wrong times and the right medicine doesn’t have a right time,
Only feel alive in the night time, take deep breaths,
We are alone in this,
You and I are alone in this,
We are in some way,
Together in this

When I think about anxiety, I like to think about it like it’s a bee,
and I wish that it would die after it stung me,
But I know it won’t,
I know it will keep on,
I know that it will drip it’s honey into the eyes of all of my closest friends and family,
And sometimes it will become too thick to see through,
And they will learn to live with it,
And I will learn to live with it

Sometimes, when I get really anxious, I am the sunset,
I envy moon, I would give anything to be able to see the way the trees move at night,
Silent, but fast, I was always told there was some kind of magic to be talked about when it came to the dark

Yes, I’m not lying when I tell you I’m riding high,
I’m feeling it all at once, everything around me, from everyone’s faces, to their footsteps, it is all running a marathon through my veins, the finish line nowhere to be found, I feel them all, all of them, their angry and driven footsteps, using the soil of my blood to plant their gardens inside of me that will one day without fail turn rotten, and die,
and my body will feel the decay of drought when my blood runs dry, when the sunlight is no longer strong enough to break through my thick skin,
I feel like the sunlight

Yes, I’m not lying when I tell you I’m riding high,
Cold, and shaking, itching for the comfort of normality inside of this hellscape, a national landmark of uneasiness and lack of empathy for the fingers on my hands and toes on my feet,
It takes a real kind of high to be able to feel when every single hair on your head moves in the wind and every single hair on the back of your neck raises, as if it’s trying to stand guard against something it knows will **** it

I find myself here, locked and loaded in this hazy battlefield, yet when I fire my guns, the only thing that comes out is dirt, and not enough of it either

I am riding high in the midst of 6 sleepless nights,
firing lucid canons into my bedroom walls in hopes that if nothing else, my delusions will break me a way out of here

That’s what this is all about anyways, right?