I am Monday
The sky on a rainy morning
I am the sea as it rumbles
The air as it trembles
I am the storm
And the calm
I am a mess
Catastrophe with eyes grayer
Than the smoke
Of the world that has burned down

And so one day we pass.
Our suffering joy departs at last,
We drool, we mutter,
Our eyelids shutter,
We gasp, we moan,
We kneel alone,
We beg, one final plea-
To whomever, please come for me.
Our fingers slip,
We ease our grip,
Thin lipped and frail,
One sharp inhale,
A heart beat fails,
And we let go.
How bad can it be?
A quick dunk in an icy lake,
A needle *****,
A fiery scorch,
Why fear so much, our lives shaped so,
By this simple passing of a single torch.

i came back to run my hands all over your catastrophes.

This is not mine!
THIS IS NOT MINE!
THIS IS NOT MY HOME!

your diamond ***
intense compaction and heat
clear like hash gum
red as a cherry until it pops bittersweet
the end is enough
but victory feels naught
years of blood I cough
and hate is what i'm taught.

Away from sane
Pleasures of pain
Try and keep the loose locks chained
Realities plane
From what we gain
Oh life is tamed
From heart to brain
Your name is bane
Now I’m the same
These maggots of shame
Express my frame
The life of death is but a game

The fowls in your lies
They **** out my eyes
Streaking fire harmonize
Along the lines of mental suicide
now lost in higher skies
Known like when a ghost dies
Inegligible melting wax
With a sea of philosophical facts
Tearing your nails for satisfaction
incomprehensible refractions
why try to grasp such fractions
to only destroy your foundation?
like narcotics and communication
or the vane abyss of dead relaxation

Such potential for catastrophe,
God couldn't resist the flipping of my reality,
The idea of such a beautiful chaos,
It was a temptation too much,
So he submitted to the Irony calling him,
And tipped it into tragedy.

IT ******* HURTS. IT ALWAYS ******* HURTS. I AM IN THIS ROOM DRY HEAVING BECAUSE IT ******* HURTS. I TOLD YOU I LOVED YOU THEN I ******* LEFT. I AM ALWAYS LEAVING THE PEOPLE I SHOULDN'T. IT ******* HURTS AND I CAN'T BREATHE BECAUSE I CAN HAVE YOU BUT I DON'T ******* WANT YOU. I DON'T WANT YOU TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH THE BIG ******* DISASTER THAT I AM. I WANT MORE FOR YOU THAN I WANT FOR MYSELF. IS THAT LOVE? I ******* LOVE YOU MORE THAN I WILL EVER LOVE MYSELF AND IT ******* HURTS. I AM FULL OF FEELINGS THAT I CAN'T ******* GET OUT. I KEEP ON REPLAYING OUR LAST WORDS TO ONE ANOTHER LIKE A ******* LOVE SONG IN MY HEAD. WE WERE NOT A ******* LOVE SONG AND WE WERE NOT ART AND WE WERE NOT BEAUTIFUL. WHAT WERE WE? WE WERE A ******* CATASTROPHE. WE WERE TRAGEDY. IT ******* HURT WHEN WE COLLIDED. I COLLAPSE IN AGONY BECAUSE THE THOUGHT OF YOU ******* HURTS. I FEEL MY BODY CRUMBLING FROM THE GRIEF LIKE A SOGGY CARD BOARD BOX LEFT IN THE RAIN. IT ******* HURTS SEEING YOUR SMILE SHATTER ON EVERY FLOOR, WALL, DOOR, WINDOW, AND MIRROR IN MY MIND. I AM RIPING MY SKIN TO SHREDS AND WRECKING THIS ROOM BUT THE THING THAT ******* HURTS IS YOU.

IT ******* HURT BEFORE WE CRASHED INTO EACH OTHER.
IT ******* HURT WHEN WE FELL IN LOVE.
AND IT ******* HURTS NOW THAT YOU'RE GONE.

It hurts.
It will always ******* hurt.

It's funny how we keep things bottled up,
in the dead of the night, dark of the room
the razor was to my wrist again-
it demanded I paint these secrets across my skin
and feel the blood rush to the open wound I caused myself.
Then I looked up and saw myself in the mirror
sunken eyes and hollowed demeanor
this wasn't me.
The light in my eyes was dark again
and the blue where I used to be was now just gray.
So I dropped what was holding me hostage-
and I turned to the pills instead.
I took one, down the hatch it went.
My breath stayed shallowed and harsh
as if my lungs were crying with me.  
I looked down at the bottle
poured it's contents to the floor and counted-
is ten enough to **** me?
I took another.
is nine more enough to **** me?
I didn't want to know.
So I held the pills beneath my fingertips
as if they were the grim reaper
and I put them back in their place.
Nine pills all back in their happy little bottle-
I realized they held more power in my life than I did.
So I broke, threw the bottle and broke the wall.
Then silence.
The only thing I heard were the thoughts in my head
and the silence of my cell phone
that I wished was ringing out to help me.
But I was alone again.
I hadn't felt this low in so long-
but this time no one was around to care.
I thought about how I could end it
and I probably wouldn't be found
until three days later.
As the sun sets and rises, sets and rises, sets and rises again
I would be one with the sky
and I wonder why the **** I want so badly to die-
because the past two weeks of my life
I finally felt ******* alive
like I could breath again-
like anxiety took a vacation with depression
and left me with the optimist to babysit.
But I guess their vacation was short-lived
and they came back-
made a mess of what I had built for myself
what I had been working so ******* hard for.
Chaos.  

So in short, I wanted to **** myself last night
thought of all the ways I could do it-
but then I saw the faces of the people I love
and then they were masked by all the pain I've caused
then that was masked by all the people that hurt me
so my knuckles repeatedly kissed the punching bag
until they bled onto the white cloth like decoration-
I was an artist.
The medicine kicked in-
sleep kissed my eyes and made my mind foggy
and I began to think about all the good things again.
I remembered the way silence was my favorite melody
and I drifted into the nirvana I was hoping for.

It's funny how we keep things bottled up-
because the silence of my cell phone
made me realize how strong I really was.
The secret I keep of last night reminds me
how many secrets are able to be kept.
The war raging inside me isn't one you win or lose-
It's the kind you have to fight in order to survive
even if no one even knows it's inside you.

The soothsayer promised a resolution.
Will there be everlasting unity
Among us humans?

The lost lovers sung
Alongside the dying swans.
Their hands raised,
Longing to find each other's arms.

Redemption returns,
Possibilities alter.
The day of reckoning confirmed
A beginning to clutch--
The rivers reverse.


I ruminate,
Alchemic waterfalls--
A crash.

(c) 2014 Brandon Antonio Smith

(Originally written 12/23/10,
Revised 9/23/14)

And when people ask "why him", all I can say is "why not?".
It's actually pretty simple. He's an outsider.
You look at all them rich boys with their perfect whitened teeth, and their v neck sweaters and polo shirts and you manage to guess they will never put a finger up to accomplish anything, there's always someone behind their every move.
And you look at him, he's a catastrophe he's a mixture of drugs, alcohol cigarettes and midnight hookers, with nothing to prove, with no one to take responsibility for his mistakes, with no pre planned future.

And so in a heartbeat, his worn off knuckles and dark eyes, his scars,
simply become, *home.