Everything, every move I make is
part of a war between my body
and myself, a war against Time,
really I don’t know which side
I want to win

But it’s out of my hands now,
Or has it always been?

In therapy they tell you
that you’re always in control,
The voices only have the power
to suggest you take that blade
to your skin, or shove your
fingers down your throat,

But you, you’ve got the power to decide what your next move is,

I don’t believe that,
I don’t believe my body
is a kingdom under my rule

I believe that my body is
a vessel in which dark things
inhabit, control, destroy

my body is a
vacant motel that welcomes
strange men smelling of whiskey
to hole up in for the night and not
look at the wreckage they’ve left
behind in the morning,

because I’m not empty,
I’m just full of all the wrong things,
I’m just full of things that won’t stay
long enough to call me home.

- S.G.

I always thought an addiction had to be
something you could physically touch,

but here I am

chasing this feeling I can’t even put into words,

I broke my knuckle open trying to
choke up what was left in me,

I saw blood, I should’ve been scared,
I should’ve wished for help, I should’ve
wished for a do-over, swore to God
"if you grant me this one wish I swear
I’ll never **** up again”

but I just wished for more.

- S.G.

there is no such thing as unconditional love, only Stockholm Syndrome.

I’m sorry
that I don’t
want help
nearly
as much
as I want
to stop
waking up.

- S.G.

my knuckles
are ******,
and I am tired

every punch I
throw means
nothing when
the enemy is
myself

I am constantly
in search for
my own voice
to find the
courage
to say,

"I don’t want to
be sad anymore,”

but even though
I know I can’t keep
living with this,
I’m not sure if I
can live without
it either.

- S.G.

Be cruel,
I am not as
delicate as
I may seem,

I want you
to hate me,

my porcelain
eyes scream,
'hurt me, hurt
me, hurt me,’

beat me, break
me, bruise me,

wear me out,

teach me a
******* lesson,
because I can’t
learn a thing
otherwise.

- S.G.

One day you’ll get used to the blood in your lungs.

Coughing on the overflow like its nothing, dripping
down your chin like the juice from ripe fruits of summer.

I wish you wouldn't look me in the eye, or maybe I just wish
you’d see a cry for help rather than the empty, dead, grey that’s left.

Come closer, kiss me, I don’t mind.
I prefer the taste of copper over
coffee and cigarettes any day.

- S.G.

Today I read an article proving not only that the story
of his resurrection was a lie, but that Jesus never lived.
He was not half-man half-god, he was less than that,
much less; a fabrication of Caesar’s imagination
created as a Matrix for the Roman Empire,

today I read an article that could’ve shattered me
if I still believed in anything at all.

- S.G.

I love you like you are the last breath I’ll ever take, breathing you in fully;
your everything turned to particles in my lungs, growing cancerous tumors
in my chest where there may as well be a sign hanging, between my *******,
‘Yours, all yours’ because there will never be another that can poison me
and make me whole the way that you do.

- S.G.

I love you, but you need to leave

I’ll see you again, I hope the things

you witness change you for the better

I thought I needed you,

but time and distance and
manipulation change things,

its only the same if I’m alone with you,
you put on a show when everyone else is around and the feeling completely disappears

I always try to tell myself you love me,
but you’re too cold for the kind of affection I need,

I don’t just want to tell you all the ****** up things I’ve felt and thought in the past three years, I want you to actually listen

If things hasn’t changed you’d have driven me insane, and I’ve already done that to myself enough.

- S.G.

shades of night cover us,
whispering exactly what
we’re too shy to say,

but it doesn’t matter that
we have to have the shadows
speak for us, I’d give my life
to hear your silence any day,

with you it’s like days never
end, with you I’m immortal,

snorting lines of stardust off
your gentle fingertips,

kissing you feels like
a whole other universe.

- S.G.

"Fear leads to control which leads to manipulation."

You hit the nail right on the head when you said that to me, and you knew it, with one sentence you summed up my entire existence. Fear is the real f-word here. Fear of not being in control, so I take control by manipulation.

Manipulating my situation, manipulating food, manipulating you* so I can feel safe, so I don’t fear.

But it all circles back around, and I’m afraid again.

I wasn’t looking
for God, but I
found the Devil,

He slid his
hands up my
skirt, rosary
beads and
all, breathing
skewed
bible verses
into my ******
ears like Mary,

The only tongue
he spoke in
was the one
he was sliding
down my throat,
forked and
snakelike,

He told me,
"Your absence
of faith is pleasing
though incorrect,
you see, just as
seeing doesn’t
mean believing,
rejecting something
doesn’t rob it of
it’s existence.
That means your
sin still counts.”

And I will burn in Hell,
just like everyone else.

- S.G.

what do you need from me?
what are you leeching off of me for,
when I’m not even your blood type.

you might as well be main-lining
******, or downing all the pills in
your medicine cabinet,

I’m not your saviour,
I’m suicide in human form,

when you look at me
what do you see?

do I read eat me?
drink me? take me once
a day with food and drink?

You know the answer,
you know that I’m empty,
void, a river that’s run dry,

you know exactly how this ends,
because I’m not your saviour,
I’m suicide in human form.

- S.G.

Two and a half years clean
and I still miss it every day,

it used to be hard for me
even to know there was a
bottle in my cupboards,

now, it’s just a lingering
thought, an ever present
"this is an option"
kind of like suicide

but suicide I’m much
more grateful for,

not that I want to die,
but that I want that control,
I’ve been saying so since I
was thirteen years old

that I’m not afraid of death,

I’m just afraid of not
being in control of it.

- S.G.

I can’t smell menthol cigarettes
or cheap beer without smelling you,

I can’t hear “you eighteen yet?”
without wanting to tear out my insides,

you ruined so many simple things and
you think you can just show up again,
acting like we’re friends

you did more than touch me
you tainted every moment of
intimacy I’ve had since,

you made me sick and broken
and clouded my judgement so
much that I didn’t know the danger
I was in until you were gone,

I felt sick in your presence,
sick hearing your name, I was
told it was butterflies, I was told
it was love,

now my friends tell me they were
scared for me,

I wish they would have kicked the
chair out from under me and the noose
you tied so tightly around my neck.

- S.G.

If my fear of falling

is really just a fear of the part

of myself that wants to jump every

time I stare off the top of a building,

If I’m not afraid of needles,

just afraid that I’ll grow to

need them, afraid that

synthetic happiness is the only

kind I’ll ever find,



If I’m not afraid of love,

but of the way lust disguises itself

so innocently and then rips out

the core of it’s victim’s being,

Then tell me, why am I afraid of you?

- S.G.

Keep your hands away, don’t look at the thick of my hips, I don’t feel small enough for your love today.

- S.G.

I don’t know where to begin,
I cut holes in my skin again

I press down my fingers to break open
the scabs when I see you smile
so I don’t get ahead of myself in thinking
I could feel good someday too

there’s red stains on all my favourite clothes

my period thrills me to no end,
dear mother nature, I wish I could
bleed every day of the month,

I’m a good ****,
I’m a tease,
I’m a corpse walking

I’m rotting flesh hanging off a meat hook,

and nothing turns me on more than these
fantasies of the barrel of a gun massaging
the back of my throat like **** in my mouth,

blood spray on the walls, dripping down my
neck and pooling on the floor like ***,

I want to lay in the wet spot and let my
eyes roll back into my skull, face-******
one final time by a revolver

- S.G.

I was promised that it is worth forgiving you, and that reassurance couldn’t have come at a better time.

Last night was spent in anger and frustration, because I love you, and the numbness has gone; so my heart is flooded. I’m drowning. There are times that I still want to hurt you like you did to me. There are also times that I want to hold you and never let you go because I’m afraid if I don’t hold tight enough, you might slip from my grasp.

Tasting another person after 18 months of me, and only me, what does that feel like? Are you afraid? Are you satisfied? Are you disgusted with yourself?

I don’t want to know her name anymore. I don’t want to know that she comforted you when I couldn’t, because that’s my job and I know you know that no one will ever love you the way that I do. No one will ever hold that place in your heart but me.

How can I say that I know that, when you did something so vile and out of character? Because that’s exactly what it was, out of character, and It must have felt empty. It had to or you wouldn’t have stopped yourself, you wouldn’t have told me. That’s how I know.

No one has ever loved me or hurt me the way that you have, the way that you do, and I really, sincerely believe that I’ve found what I need in you. I’ve found the love that everyone searches for, and I cannot give up on that.

I can’t ***** out my only source of light when I know there’s so much darkness to face ahead of me.

- S.G.

self destruction is a strange thing,
it’s all-consuming and before you
know it, hurting yourself
as a priority becomes second nature,

before you know it, ideas of
suicide slipping into your mind
are just another part of your
every day, every week,
every month rituals,

like brushing your teeth

or waking up with blood in
your *******

just another thing to mark
on your calendar,

depression becomes another
lover with baggage you thought
you could handle, but you didn’t
know that that baggage would
weigh so heavy on your soul,

you think you’re stronger
than this, and I’m here to tell
you that you are,

but being strong enough
doesn’t always mean sticking
it out with a lover that makes
your heart weary,

the palpitations aren’t a sign
that you’re weak, they’re a
message pattering in and out in
quick, unsteady impulses to remind
you that your heart still beats
but it’s just as tired as you are,

and you both deserve better than this.

- S.G.

so take out your frustrations on me.

slam me up against
a wall and **** me like you’ve
never been more angry in your life,

my silly, empty head thinks
masochism is a virtue, so don’t
ease up when I cry; I want
bruises on my neck, hips, & thighs,

I want to feel my whole body
pulsate for days afterwards,

make me cry, make me
apologize for thinking I’m
anything more than a toy.

- S.G.

I can no longer tell the difference between kissing you and wrapping my lips around a bottle of whiskey,

is that your hands on my waist or are the warm sensations of alcohol caressing me again?

I get the spins, can’t think straight, my heart palpitating like I just did a line of blow off your fingertip,

I want you to take me in and sober me up
only to knock me off my feet again when our eyes meet,

I’m a sloppy drunk but I don’t care,
I’ll stumble my way home to you every night if you’ll let me.

- S.G.

I saw your lover in my dreams last night,
you might never get him back again,
but I can’t get him away from me,

I kissed your lover in my dreams last night,
softly, sweetly, and it hurt worse and felt better
than anything I’d ever felt before,

I ****** your lover in my dreams last night,
and it felt like nothing compared to the guilt when
I realized that I loved your lover in my dreams last night.

- S.G.

I am
Spiraling,  
        spiraling,
spiraling

         d
           o
             w
               n,

and I can’t
find one thing
to grasp onto,

not the
smallest little
bit of hope to
cling to,

the ember
burning bright
at the end of my
cigarette does
not make up
for the sunlight
I’ve been lacking,

and the words
stuck on repeat
in my head, like
a skipping vinyl,

every living
          thing dies,
      every living thing
dies, every living
     thing dies, and soon
                     you will too,

do not mourn
over loss of
perspective
while you still
have hold of it,

do not mourn
for the emptiness
you will no longer feel,

do not mourn
for Heaven,
and do not
mourn for Hell,

just be happy
          it all ends.

- S.G.

I pick at my skin,
pull at my fat, measure my
thighs, arms, shoulders, hips
and say things like,

"I wish I could just be normal."

but you don’t realize what that means,
you don’t realize that fat is not just a physical
feeling, fat is everything I hate about the world,
everything I hate about waking up, everything
that I am deathly afraid of,

fat is everything I wish I could say to you
to make you understand all the insignificant
things throughout the day that make me go crazy

"I wish I could make this all go away."

I wish I could make myself go away

I wish the
400 calories,
500 calories,
600 calories less

could make me disappear

I wish being empty
was as fulfilling as my
head tells me it is.

- S.G.

Your voice
Broken and weeping
Reminds me more of
false ******,
Than compassion

It cries,
“I am filled,
I am overflowing,
Be like me, be like me,”

But it echoes,
“Fill me, fill me,
With anything,
with everything”

- S.G.

Your voice
Broken and weeping
Reminds me more of
false ******,
Than compassion

It cries,
“I am filled,
I am overflowing,
Be like me, be like me,”

But it echoes,
“Fill me, fill me,
With anything,
with everything”

- S.G.

This is my heart
on the table,

this is my soul
on the line,

and it hurts,
it hurts, it hurts,
when I look
in your eyes

who is to
say that loving you
isn’t the same as
taking a knife to
my thigh,

all over again.

- S.G.

she says she loves that
I listen with my eyes because
no one else ever listens at all,

she says she loves that I call
her bluffs, that I tell her she’s
******* up when everybody
just looks elsewhere,

she says she wants to
keep in touch, she wishes
she was better, she wasn’t
crazy, she wants to know
me still,

she says she hasn’t said,
"I love you" to anyone in over
a year, not even her own mother

I know this is true because
she hasn’t cried since then
either, and that’s the only
good reason to cry:

when you’re in love,
when you’re out of love,
when you love your life
so much that you want to die,

and even though
she never says she loves me,

it’s there when she talks to me,
it’s there when she talks about me

it’s the underlying message
when she calls me, drunk, at 3am

because my hands are the only
ones that have ever fit hers.

- S.G.

You are a collection
of things I’m not sure I
can believe but will spend
my life studying,

You are fiction,

But you give me wings
(not the kind of Icarus
though I must say, if I had
the option of drowning in you,
I might be just as foolish as he)

You’ve got a touch like
Midas, and the way I see
it the only explanation is
I’ve been blessed by Eros
to find you,

and though our story may
not end so tragically, like
Icarus, I am sure to fall

down,
               down

     d
         o
            w
                n

- S.G.

I place my hand on your bare

Stomach and you **** because its

So cold,

I would kiss you

But I know you don’t like

The taste of blood and ***** mixed,
I also know that the thick purple bags under my eyes turn you off, you’d rather watch me get a full nights rest than **** me now,

I’m pathetic at best yet you still love me, and the longer you stay the more I feel sad for you, but please don’t ever mistake that for a wish that you’d leave

You’re the glue that holds my bones together and I’d collapse into dust without you.

- S.G.

It’s late and I want to be charming
and say that I’m still up because I’m
thinking of you, but I’m not

it’s just my brain chemistry has
been so off lately that if I let my
mind focus on emotion for even
a second, I lose control

so I’ve been pushing you to the
back of my mind because you
bring out the most life in me,

too much life.

so I’ll be up all night pretending
I’m not a hopeless romantic, smoking
cigarettes out of this 8th floor hotel window,
wondering how much I’d feel if I let myself fall.

- S.G.

I can do whatever I want,
I can do whatever I please,
dress myself in dirt and lingerie,
wear my filth on my sleeve,

a *****, a ******,
I've just got a fixation
for the darkness that
draws you in,

I hope my eyes are
empty, I hope my pulse
is weak, I get high off
my hearts palpitations,

I'm the yeast in your mouth,
the E. Coli in your bowels,

I'm the **** underneath your nails,

wipe the snot off my lips
and rub it in my cuts,
I'm a walking talking
bacterial infection,
a living breathing cesspool,

human garbage.

- S.G.

Your perspective
Is your reality

You create your demons

the disappearing creature
You see out of the corner
Of your eye,
The dictating voices,
And all of the ghosts
That haunt you

You laugh,
try to convince
The world
That You are not afraid

But you still don’t know
That you, yourself,
Can destroy the very
Demons you are
So bound by

repeat after me:
“I am in control.”

You can exorcise
The cold, abandoned
Body you are
Meant to treat
Like a home

Purge it’s
Negative forces,
Rid it of cobwebs
And dust mites,
Set rat traps,
Pull up the blinds
And paint the shutters
The same colour as
The sun in the sky

You are not
Deep, dark and dank
Like they said you were

You are
A little bit empty,
And in need of some
Home improvement

You are not unfixable,
Because you are not broken

- S.G.

I step into my bathtub, my blue skin steaming as it hits the water,
hoping its hot enough to sear off the ***** feeling your touch left,
but god knows I’ve tried so many times and I still can’t peel back my
pruned skin afterwards to reveal the innocence I once wore,

I stay up until I physically can’t. I try to focus on the constant taste of ***** or blood in my mouth at night to keep my mind from bringing back the phantom scent of lukewarm beer and menthol cigarettes when I close my eyes.

My head is flooding (I think you’re the reason I only ever drink liquor, but I know you’re the reason I scowl at people who smoke Newport 100s) I am disgusted- No. I am disgusting, you made me disgusting.

I can’t let go of this fear of no control, because when you held power you pushed my limits far past their breaking point and even then I was too weak, too weak to say no, too afraid I’d be the one condemned.

You eradicated every rule and broke me and it’***** me harder now than ever, because the dust rose after you leveled me.

Now I can see you as the monster you are, now I just wish I was numb.

- S.G.

She tells me
I’m lucky because
I don’t get bad acne

I tell her
she’s lucky because
she won’t have to be in
a wheelchair before
she turns thirty

and then
everything
gets quiet.

- S.G.

I think of you ‘round the clock,
hoping that maybe doing so will
bring you back,

but I don’t want you back
the way that you are now,
I want you back the way that
you were when you loved me,

when we were soul mates,
the kind that knew we’d always
have each other, when other
lovers would come and go

everyone tells me to
let you go, too but then
you call, that spark comes
back and I’m tied to you again.

- S.G.

This isn’t something you just live with. You don’t wake up every morning and think, ‘I won’t eat for the day, and that’s okay.’ And when you plunge your fingers down your throat after every meal the scars that form on your knuckles remind you that you can’t even think for yourself anymore.

It is total loss of control.

Your heart is in the wrong place, the inside of your head a minefield.

but at least you’re empty, the voice says.


But the truth is, you’re just afraid. You’re so ******* afraid of what will become of you if you let that meal sit in your stomach.

Get rid of the weight so you won’t sink, you’ve got to be a featherweight to float on these tides.

The other girls don’t matter, the magazines and billboards, the unkind words written on the bathroom stall; fat. pig. ugly. ****. They don’t matter either, what’s in your head has nothing to do with the outside world, it’s all a matter of what you want, what you can’t see in yourself.

But let me tell you this;
if happiness was a number on the scale,
if joy came in a diet pill, if collarbones and rib cages
could fix the constant ache inside your chest,
if you could purge away your sins, if you could
just lose five more pounds and be happy,
you wouldn’t be here in the first place.

Things would be so simple again.
But things are not.

And I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m so ******* sorry that you hurt. I’m sorry that you’re insides twist and your head shouts those angry words at you when you’re sad.

Always sad.

But you are beautiful, my dear,
and I can’t help you **** yourself,
I don’t want you to feel this torment that I know all too well.

The last thing I want
in the whole entire world,
is to see you, be like me.

- S.G.

kiss me deeply,
use the rhythm
of your hips to
tell me you love me
without words,

let me do all
the talking, only
when I write
about the heat
of your breath
on my neck,

the grip of
your hands
on my hips,

the overwhelming
thrill when I feel
your weight
on top of me,

because when
words fail, all I
need is your
body language.

- S.G.

I hear voices in the walls,
footsteps of ghosts walking down my hall,
and though I know I created them
I still can’t help but be afraid

They speak in whispers
telling me what I want to hear,
giving me someone to blame,
someone other than myself

but if they really are all in my mind,
I guess I’m just sending myself in circles

maybe that’s why my head
always feels like it’s spinning

Or maybe I just
cannot fathom why I would
construct such a thing that would
aid my demise, as it convinces me
that it is all I need

giving me the illusion that
my feet are steady on the ground
while it pushes me
closer and closer to the edge

- S.G.

***** up my sorrows
'til I'm empty,
'til I'm cold.

***** up my sorrows,
I’ll be buried ‘fore
I’m old.

- S.G.

Everyone I’ve spoken to


Tells me that if you were
“Actually” suicidal


You wouldn’t want
Anyone to know

To be honest I’ve


Probably said it myself


A few times

But I don’t know if


I can believe that,


Because every time


I think of dying


All I want to do is


Scream, “Hear me,


hear my ******* voice
and understand it, because


I need you to know that
This is real,
and this is all I think about”

And I don’t want to hear


That it is going to get better.


I just want to feel legitimate again.

- S.G.

I don’t need you to psychoanalyze
my every reaction,

I left out punctuation
when I responded to you,
I gave you a one worded answer,
I let my head hang
a little lower today,
and I wanted to be alone

I don’t need your ******* Freudian theories,
and you can keep your ******* remedies
because no amount of positive thinking
is going to slow my mind’s decay

And I don’t need to justify myself,
to someone who is practically a stranger

If I can’t comprehend
what my mind does to me some days
enough to put it into words,
neither can you.

- S.G.

For a while
I thought I had
a debt to pay

that the more
I let this take from me
and the smaller I became,
my fears
would do just the same

and as the stomach acid
burned my lips and tongue
I believed it’s sensation
was the physical
manifestation
of the nightmares
pouring out of me

merely side-effects
of my own exorcism

- S.G.

Your perspective
Is your reality

You create your demons

the disappearing creature
You see out of the corner
Of your eye,
The dictating voices,
And all of the ghosts
That haunt you

You laugh,
try to convince
The world
That You are not afraid

But you still don’t know
That you, yourself,
Can destroy the very
Demons you are
So bound by

repeat after me:
“I am in control.”

You can exorcise
The cold, abandoned
Body you are
Meant to treat
Like a home

Purge it’s
Negative forces,
Rid it of cobwebs
And dust mites,
Set rat traps,
Pull up the blinds
And paint the shutters
The same colour as
The sun in the sky

You are not
Deep, dark and dank
Like they said you were

You are
A little bit empty,
And in need of some
Home improvement

You are not unfixable,
Because you are not broken

- S.G.

I am not your rock,
your place of solace,
and I cannot give you
structure in these
empty words

My own life is
cracking at it’s
foundation
and I’ve lost
the architects
phone number

You have to
find foundation
in yourself

because odds are
your handyman,
isn’t on-call for only you

and when the
wind comes,
and the rain pours
you’ll be stuck
with leaky ceiling tiles
and a draft that will
chill you to the bone

- S.G.

I wasn’t looking
for God, but I
found the Devil,

He slid his
hands up my
skirt, rosary
beads and
all, breathing
skewed
bible verses
into my ******
ears like Mary,

The only tongue
he spoke in
was the one
he was sliding
down my throat,
forked and
snakelike,

He told me,
"Your absence
of faith is pleasing
though incorrect,
you see, just as
seeing doesn’t
mean believing,
rejecting something
doesn’t rob it of
it’s existence.
That means your
sin still counts.”

And I will burn in Hell,
just like everyone else.

- S.G.

Tonight I bent over
to slide my fingers down
my throat & purge my sins away,

but I came to find that
my esophagus has learned
so much after months of this
nightly ritual that it no longer
needs my assistance

it’s hard to exist when
the things you are most
proud of are the things
you have to hide from
everyone else.

- S.G.

You asked me why I don’t like bringing people around
why I spend every day alone in my room
when I have plenty of people who would love my company
and my thoughts were so tangled around the real answer that
all I could tell you was that something in me changed a few months ago

I couldn’t get it out of me
you cannot know that I have succumbed to my need for control
and now it is what controls me

I don’t make my own decisions,
everything is pre-planned and mechanical

while I let my hands crawl their way
down my throat and empty out my stomach
I tell myself this is it,

this is really what it means
to be in control

I let myself believe that fighting my demons
means giving up every ounce of control that I have gained
in the past two years
by giving up myself

I don’t want them,
I don’t want you,
to get close to me because if you’re close enough
you can see the cracks in my skin

but no one can see how easily
I fracture if I keep my distance

I don’t want to be broken,
but more than that I don’t want you to realize that I am.

- S.G.