Grab your screwdrivers and join me
As we break down all the joints
Saw my limbs and plier my nails
The magic of deconstruction.

Blood dripping onto my pillows
As I try to escape this reality
The colorful pill diet
Waterboarding me between sleep
And an existential crisis.
I think a demon will come in tomorrow
He’ll probably be wearing a suit and tie
Maybe he’ll sit down for some coffee
And we’ll make pleasantries as the day goes by.
Oh there I’m wandering again.
My mind is slipping.
Hysteria has got me in her cage.
I hope I can hang on enough
To cull my life before I lose
More of myself in the rubble of this brick and mortar.

When I see God creating life,
I watch as his hands pause
over sculpting your body.

As he takes a moment
to smile slyly at himself
and take pride
in his most beautiful creation.

And I'll break a glass
just to prove
you could've
slipped right through
my hands.

God, I hate 3am!

You make me late for work and grind my mind into bite sized peanut butter cups.

My thoughts are not a drill,
but they ***** me like Debbie did Dallas.

                     *really? You're doing ****
                  references now? *

*******!
YES, I said **** in a poem!

                  *who are you talking to? *

YOUR MOTHER!!!

always voices at 3am!

Voices like shadows barely perceived on the edge of your ear.

                       *you can't hear shadows *

No one ******* ASKED YOU!


Sleep is a midnight UFO hovering behind an old farmhouse.

You may have seen something... once, but you can't prove it really exists.

Not at 3am when shadows walk like peeping Toms passed your window.

Not at 3am when your eyes are shot and your skull tingles like peppermint body wash on a squeaky clean *******.

What the **** am I saying?

I don't even know anymore.



©Nathan A. Brock 2022

My sanity is gone
tired of being the pawn
it's only bones on the lawn
with spite in each bone
it's alter ego is all alone
my insanity is grown

I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.

The Illness

You spend exponentially
All services of every cell in your body
For years
To keep an ill one alive

Possible prolonged moments of happiness and hope
trickle in
Between the hospitalizations

Your spending is what you find out
He doesn’t trust.

What one finds out
Is ones unprepared-ness
My son wants to claim his life
For himself, to which could be his end or not.

Like the breaking egg, beak first
Or sunlight cracking through trees
Where light comes out and gives birth
With uneven decisions
Will I live?
And what IS living with a chronic diease like?

What he believes is not that he doesn’t trust you,
He just wants to trust himself.
What other choice in the insanity defense is there
That would be as human, then giving freedom of choice to him.