I just sent an email to my Mom.
Part of me feels it
Part of me wonders if I'm overdramatic

I feel like ****.
Like, I feel different than when I felt depressed
But this is still not a place I want to be

Consistent
Draining
I never feel ok anymore.
I'm not even sure what ok feels like.

I keep wanting to drink for all the wrong reasons
I never get drunk
But I always want to reach that happy nirvana
That "tipsy enough to forget all your worries" place
There's something seriously wrong with me

I haven't actually talked to my family in AZ for over a month
I schedule skype dates with a woman I'll probably never see again
More than I do with my own father.
What type of **** is that?

I looked at ****, I ****** myself today.
I feel like the biggest ******* this planet has seen.

I also lack self forgiveness.

I got an email back from a priest today.
I told him I'd be interested in joining the priesthood
I realized I might have been lying,
But honestly,
I don't even know!
I feel like I'm sitting on my thumb,
Trying to figure out the world as it
Races by me,
Unwilling to stop and allow me to catch my breath
Or read the signs or understand a **** shred of anything

This is what I'm talking about
Part of me feels this,
And the other part just scoffs, and says I'm melodramatic
Pick yourself up
Dust yourself off and figure out
what the hell you're doing

I feel so alone anymore.
Like, if there's not someone by my side
I somehow lack basic humanity.
Like I need someone to be there
If they aren't, I'm obviously not worth much

I closed the blinds four different times today.
I didn't want the neighbors to see my actions.
After a certain point, I closed them to watch a movie
And I haven't opened them back up,
even though
it would probably cheer me up a great deal

This is probably one of the longest "poems"
I've ever written.
It's not poetry, it's freestyle
Not like it matters,
It's like an art major defining the different strokes that an artist used in a painting
Like I give a ****
It's still a painting

Lent is one of the hardest times of the year.
I feel it with every fiber of my being.
Nothing about this situation makes me feel ok.
I feel out of body, out of mind, out of soul.
I'm pretty sure, at this point, St. Peter wouldn't let me in.
In my heart of hearts I want it desperately, but
The rest of me still says no.

I'm so messed up it's ridiculous.
And I sent an email to my mom chronicling her son's failures
Her son's issues,
And why,
Her son
Needs to go back to a counselor
Because I'll be ****** if he's not "fixed" yet.

I’ve seen some patterns that happen every day
In the growth and the stagnant way we decay
In these walls with no windows and the teachers all glazed
Eye’s glazed from the all-consuming glooming haze
Of what we all must become someday, right?

So live it up now because in ten years we’ll be settled
We’ll either grind it out or run away from the ghetto
To suburbia where no black man resides
This is the land where white men all hide
Have kids, hate your wife, hate your life because you have resigned
To what you hated at sixteen because it happens all the time

I need to SCREAM that this is not the only thing
We are not all cogs in this machine that lacks life’s meaning
Dr. Manhattan said that we’re all tied to strings
And the FDA keeps on poisoning
Well he had a point and our food disappoints
But we are not hopeless, we can anoint
Our own power to see the strings that toy with girls and boys
And slow the rate at which we destroy
Our own bodies and homes and the earth and our minds
We are capable of breaking societal binds

Beat

So pass that joint to the **** and get out
Because substance doesn’t need more substance when your mind could spill out
From thinking, from capability, from plane to plane
Polluting the air while you pollute your own brain
I’m not disrespecting, there’s always a place
But get out of that scene so you can get out of the race to the end
Of youthful reputation that always constantly needs mending
Escaping won’t help because it’s always just pretending

We are not victims and we are not martyrs
We have contributed to this world from the very start
Of our ephemeral, radical, illogical existence
With our parents raising us to never know resistance
But it’s in our bodies we just refuse to assist it
The birth is messy, ******, not gut-free, completely you and completely me
Covered in what we call wicked tragedy
And from the womb of our souls we take a new body with standards to break
It slithers from slender thighs like a domesticated snake
Down our legs and across the floor so we can FINALLY RELATE
To a world that this city doesn’t know
A world outside of the common, the rotting, the flow
And you know that I know that we know we can feel it
We feel it because we can hardly *believe it

Art work in pencil
Peach shadows on the outline of everything
Jaw lines, good times
Trees in the park
Dinosaur tracks and Fedex Fax

Librarians don't do their job

I was talking about shadows
Then my mind was robbed

"Patience is a virtue"
My mother used to say
I wonder if she'd say the same
Seeing as it will be my demise
Three long weeks since I got that slip
I wonder how long I'll have
To wait...

Questions brought by vague answers
Patience will be my demise
Do I wait?
Or is that what kills me?
Surely if it were,
"Im" would fall before the word on the slip...
What if patience leads to something?
Questions...
    Questions...
        Questions...

And that night I was a mechanical doll
and I turned right and left, to all sides
and I fell on my face and broke to bits,
and they tried to put me together with skillful hands
And then I went back to being a correct doll
and all my manners were studied and compliant.
But by then I was a different kind of doll
like a wounded twig hanging by a tendril.
And then I went to dance at a ball,
but they left me in the company of cats and dogs
even though all my steps were measured and patterned.
And I had golden hair and I had blue eyes
and I had a dress the color of the flowers in the garden
and I had a straw hat decorated with a cherry.



Translated from the original Hebrew by Karen Alkalay-Gut.