Breathless
Don't challenge my limit
The house is full
With the presence of the ugly greed

Don't put on a pretty face
Push away your own responsibilities

Couldn't mouth a single thing
Putting on a pretty mask just like what you taught me
Loathing that useless cry beneath

Soon the unbreakable chain will be seemed

Holding back will be out of point

She was warned that a collection of rice would weigh a lot.
She shook her head and claimed nonsense while exhibiting the size of each grain.
And her collection grew with marvelous and hideous grains of rice
Until
9:30pm one Saturday, while she was sitting on a couch with loved ones, laughing at baseball
And she knew, if she drew one more breath-
She would implode.
The bag would explode
Millions, billions of grains would come spilling out of the wound.
She ran
Hyperventilated the whole way home-
Not even home, dog sitting was more rice she picked up that week.
Curled in a ball all night, counting the seconds until she could flee to her sanctuary-
Retrieve her thread
Sew the hole
Hold onto the grain
Every breath a dagger
Every heart beat, a beat for a grain-
The reason she has them to begin with

It's funny:
Until now I couldn't imagine dependency on substances.
I didn't know how to imagine addiction.
Couldn't imagine a Routine in Smoke

But for the first time I got just to the edge--
went only a bit beyond.
And then I forgot.
I forgot to worry
my head like a puff of cottonwood
I didn't even have a backburner on
Simmering the responsibility
the inability
the fragility
of my self.

When I woke up it was back.
I had worry rushing to fill my head because it had
to make up for Lost Time.
and i wish i never had to stop Losing Time.

I just want to write one more,
      before I become an adult again.

Death lies at a bottomless cliff
Gorging the valley till the earth splits
And marrow spills through black haze chatter
Between bones of ancestral desires

His voice came through to me one night
A wisp that seeped past glass and flesh
To trickle deprecation
And lay my fitful mind to rest

"All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
You gorge yourself to death

All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
Where men exist"

Whether or not you
Do what's right should never be
Dictated by man.

I slip under with a cry
and am lost to the depths,
sinking ever deeper
into the blue
as though bound by
ball and chain

What I pass on my way down
is not glittering schools
of fish
or the benevolent
sea turtle,
but a circling, snarling
mob of responsibilities,
a sight more menacing
than even
the most cadaverous
shark

If you counted up all the seconds we spent tweeting,
All the minutes  we spent repeating,
All the hours we spent faking this thing-
"#YOLO", we call it.
If all 7 billion of us added up,
How many lives could we make
With the tick-tocks we spent talking about their brevity?
How many lives could we have saved, changed, re-arranged
With the attitude of using that one life to make a difference,
Instead of abusing the battle cry of a short life to do useless, irresponsible ****.
Calories, pranks, drugs, lust, rebellion.
Do you feel stupid for the things you bought with YOLO now?
'Cause you got it wrong.
Your life will flash before your eyes,
But will yours be worth watching?
It all counts.
But did you make it count?