From atop lofty thoughts,
dropped off softly;
so often, I lay awake
turning and tossing,
internal monologue talking,
masochistic sophistry blossoming
as it ought not to be.

A colossal cloth,
silken plume,
ink blot shades of grey
spread, peacocking;
this offering of pebbles brought
a monument
to all of the impossible
rocking before toppling-
comatose and claustrophobic,
I can exert no reverse inertia
to stop this cacophony.

Anxious, fraught,
my worries stalking me;
distraught
and tense posturing;
I fought to hold,
my fingers taut;
knuckles knotting,
vices tightly throttling.

Locked between
clock's tick and tock,
every second,
hands painstakingly wrought-
caught up,
sudden and shockingly.

Crawling awkwardly,
clawing at the walls,
coughing from the noxious oxygen
of my own rotting sarcophagus.

Insomnia fostering this paradox,
mocking me;
sleep deprivation walking,
no elysian veil to cross for me;
my own exhaustion
the coffin accosting me;
awful volume of this noise
ultimately just grains of static
all for naught,
frothing
and washed to sea.

The first time you told me that you don't love me anymore,
I slept for 12 hours, hoping that I'd never wake up.
And when I woke up, I just found myself wanting to sleep again
Because reality bites,
And it bit me big time, leaving its mark on my skin.
Reality bit me so hard that it sunk its teeth into my flesh until it reached the deepest part of my bones.
But, more than that, reality bit me so ******* hard that it reached something much deeper than my veins.
It reached something deeper where I cannot tend to the wounds that it caused me.

And I found myself wanting to sleep again.

I was hoping that shutting my thoughts down with sleep would help me forget you
But I was wrong
Because in my dreams, I was holding your hands.
And even though you were pulling it away from me, I had the strength to hold on to it and I never let you go.
How I wish I had the strength to hold on to you while I was awake
The same way that I am telling you in my dreams how my fingers fit the spaces between yours.
How I was insisting to you that being with me was the perfect thing to do
Because it's perfect when I am with you.

And I found myself wanting to sleep again.

Because in my dreams, you are still with me
Even though, at the back of my conscious mind,
I'm aware that you weren't there
And that it was all a mirage.
But it doesn't hurt this much.
It doesn't hurt this much...
When sleep is my companion.

Starting up you're all I want to touch
just us, half naked
weekends wasted
stripping, sniffing, sipping
its star splitting

you stain my brain
and thoughts on my sheets
its been weeks and I'll always choose you over sleep

you're smug
cos you think I'm in love
but you know I'm caving
the hum of your presence I'm craving
the lull of my lust misbehaving
all senses wavering
I stare my issues in the face

spiteful inflictions influx your world
this happiness is on borrowed time
as a sun bleeds beauty
my heels ***** with demise
staged under skies of potent paradise
and I've lost all sense of myself
smothered by mental health

there's toxicity to our proximity
that renders all possibilities for me
I sigh to leave behind heavy lies
but at least I'm half free from anxiety
and I can smoke again

yet there's more bad decisions in the shape of you
and we know its not true
but I decanter out the decadence
so I wont feel possession
obsession can maintain you
don't use it to sustain you

the complications spring my elations
hallucinations that restores clarity
tiny triggered spores open doors to expose your vanity
egos obscured what our reality ignores
as we explore each other's minds and sanity
potions of emotions keep the notion
that were not too eager for unhealthy devotion
we climb on frantic antics and struggle with the semantics
of what we want to say...

if we enjoyed being bored
not living for drama
reserving our pain
and deserving our karma

my cat scraps the shadows as
my mind maps the gallows
feasting on conspiracies of negativity
but hardly mindful to see
they'll always be a distraction
an infectious interaction
that puts things off track

mellowed attributes and more attention
make room for romance soon to be rotten
a spark of love so soon forgotten

apparatus attitudes
practice in ventriloquism of truth
an alchemist interlude
as I manoeuvre to conclude
these epiphanies are constant
then snoozed away
I don't owe you
in blue to choose these lazy ways
days of ***** are hazy with
drunken clues, to forget the thoughts
bought from the hangover before
this is gifted guilt but I know me by now
and its obscurely ordinary
to be deliciously disgusted by you

Still more, in words

In experience

Confusing Familiarity with Comfort

Confusing Comfort with Peace

Reifying confusion, but not successfully

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Forgetting

Seeing through, a single pinhole in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Pinholes everywhere, more than can be contained

Not containing

Torn all over

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand very still and very quite so I can feel, hear, sense

Perfect realism

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Agitation, but only conceptual

Feeling tight

Feeling rehearsed

Feeling like an imposter

Wanting to impress

Wanting to be convinced of Self, of Realness

Fortified by others knowing, or preferably- admiration

Like being constructed out of sets of other peoples' eyes

Like being made real by propagating in more minds, many more minds, specific minds. In countless beating and virtual hearts, likes, thumbs up

Not wanting to be forgotten, while alive, while dead

Taxed by maintenance and constant imminent collapse

Compassion, like collapsing into a safe lap

Relinquishing

No pretense

Bare being

More naked than when unclothed

Total exposure

Outed, in the light of knowing

Self forgetting and glimpses of freedom

Trusting sighing

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence, visceral

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, brief equilibrium

Reifying stability. Gone.

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also, sometimes, just plain humorous

And absurd

Crying

Loving people

Grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Encountering this, intimate, me, indistinguishable being, but everywhere

Ouch

Awareness

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like the last wring of that silk dress you weren't supposed to squeeze dry

Feeling like I shouldn't know what I know, like I couldn't. This must be illegal, cosmically illegal

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong softness

Loving with understanding

Loving with teeth and nails

Music, lacerating

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. Like physically with my body.

Knowing I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that

Sleep deprivation

***

Guilt

Sense-making and maps of meaning

Revisiting memories

Crying

Staying away from scary corners of my mind

Deliberately going toward scariness

Not resisting

Yes resisting

Respecting resistance

Compulsive tv watching

Dropping or letting go over and over again

Exploring

Curiosity

Forgetting and then remembering that it’s all happening on its own, noticing this, knowing this, realizing this

Realizing that realization comes and goes on its own

Being in love with everything

Crying

Playing with time and concepts

Craving emptiness

Love

Catastrophizing

Ranking what "works" (i.e. sleep deprivation is effective), noticing that the metric of “effective” and "works" is = resulting in greater illusions of "forgetting" with a capital F

Loving everything

Being everything

Self-flagellation

Not really believing any of the stories or narratives

Procrastinating

Being irresponsible

Getting off on self-loathing

Forcing intimacy

Compassion, large, whole, unrelenting, everywhere

Oversharing

Falling in love with a homeless person at a traffic stop

Being bored and sad and hopeless and desperate

Remembering inherent wholeness

Being stubborn

Getting out of the way always feels like dying

Loving dying

Loving mourning dying

Dramatizing dying

Wanting to be seen and loved

Self-loathing

Intensity

Craving intensity

Hating craving intensity

Knowing that nothing is a problem

Suffering

Being impatient

Being very very patient

Feeling like I don’t belong in the world, like people and things and money and social media are alien, foreign and scary

Feeling like I am the world

Forgetting that knowing how to verbalize isn’t the same as knowing

Wanting knowing with words to be the same as Knowing

Wanting knowing to be a Real, solid thing

Fear

Mortal fear

Bewilderment

Constant background anxiety

Hating this body

Not caring for this body

Being burdened by this body

Feeling trapped in a body

Feeling more trapped in a mind

Wanting knowing to resolve everything

Wanting to be saved

Thinking that I probably don’t need to be saved

Thinking or knowing(?) there’s nothing to be saved from

Knowing that I can’t be saved

Feeling open

Feeling vulnerable

Feeling exposed

Feeling bad

Feeling like I'm doing it wrong

Believing it all

Wanting to both believe it and have a choice about when, where, and to what extent I believe it

Not knowing where the edge is until I've fallen off

Feeling violated

Feeling like existence is non-consensual

Somehow trusting all of it, totally, exactly as it is

Watching the panicking

More crying

Being one

Being very very aware

Noticing and letting go of effort in one swift move

Compulsive clenching

Compassion

Dissolving

Disillusion

Dying without the novelty

Being ok vey very briefly and for no apparent reason/because of no reason./?

Wanting distraction

Respecting needing distraction

Getting out of the way of intelligent coping mechanisms

Villifying coping mechanisms

Understanding only in retrospect

Frustration

Compassion, deep, like warm water

Compassion, hard, like being ****** vey very slowly

Torture

Life-giving torture

Never wanting to stop

Marveling

Abundance like grace, like not deserving, like not needing to be deserving, like deserving is perverse language

Tasting everything

Endless kaleidoscopes of being and tasting and knowing

Non visual seeing

Clarity, brightness, nothing is a problem

Being alive

Being sososo tired

Wanting to rest, to die into void and nothing

Wanting to hibernate

Wanting to still

Dying to get off

Begging to get off

Finding the edge more thrilling than the center (because then the center can be anything at all?)

Loving all the previous versions of this being

Needing to hate, loathe, earlier renditions of this being

Hating repulsion

Trusting repulsion

Getting stuck because resisting repulsion

Knowing that there's no way out

Knowing that the way out that I'm seeking isn't a way out

Not wanting to do the work

Dancing around the center, constantly

Feeling dizzy with chaos, with knowledge of power

Feeling comfortable with mediocrity

Hating mediocrity

Waking up with jaw tension from the enormity of my own suppressed power

Telling stories about sensations

Relying on self-bullying methods I know don't work

Perfecting the art of pretending

Perfecting the art of self-deception

Wanting to make the stakes higher

Being overwhelmed by my own storytelling

Not wanting to give stories credibility by dispelling them

Naval gazing

Loving philosophy

Feeling dried up, tired, stagnant, disinterested, not engaged, not here.

Sleepwalking. Sleep writing. Sleep talking. Sleep caring

Not sleeping

Vivid dreaming

High weirdness

Questioning my sanity

Romanticizing insanity

Wanting to blur all boundaries

Wanting to smooth the edges of reality

Questioning reality

Destabilizing reality

Feeling destabilized

Feeling irresponsible

Guilt

Feeling sick and tired

Feeling scared

Feeling hopeless

Wanting to reach out

Feeling like everything is inevitable

Feeling like suffering is inevitable

Recognizing kindness

Discerning well (properly? Clearly? Well.)

Fearful trusting

Thinking too much

Not wanting to love my dad as much as I do.

Chasing the intellectual high

Disappointment

No need for resolution

Feeling caught in existence

Feeling caught up. Like in a potato sack; I can explore the exact measure of my confinement, the sensorial elements, the scratchiness, the filtering light from the outside, the stagnation, the wanting to stretch.

I love this being.

This. It's not a problem.

Confusing familiarity with comfort

Confusing comfort with peace

Reifying confusion, but not really

Yielding, on my knees, heart to the sky

Seeing through, like pinholes in a perfectly realistic backdrop

Dispelling everything

Stripping away the Stripping away

Trying to stand still and feel

Wanting to be convinced by rage

Always loving Sad, not despondent, just sad

Feeling continuous

Feeling fragmented

Feeling like motion, like flow

Feeling like thousands of still frames, constant flickering

Grasping at impermanence

Resting in the middle

Dancing down the tightrope

Knowing perfect poise, so so brief

Everything is hysterically funny

Hysterically

But also just plain humorous

And absurd

Loving people

Feeling grateful for people

Seeing beauty everywhere

Always coming back

Like an epic

Like a great love story

Like a violin solo in a forbidden song

Like the last wring of that silk dress you're not supposed to squeeze dry

Knowing the inside of my hand

Knowing teenage shame

Knowing being yelled at, towered over, by my dad, in a narrow
hallway, eyes glued to speckled floor tiles, feeling small, nowhere to go

Loving with my body, with my hands, with my mouth, with my whole entire strong soft body

Crying with tears, and snot, and heaving

Becoming one single, concentrated point

Wanting to envelope everything. Really. Actually. With my body.

I am not this voice

Or this writer

Or this narrator

Though I am also all that