“She’s sleeping til noon every day
With a mood that’s always gray”
Is what her mother says
While rolling her eyes,
Piles of laundry,
Countless dishes
in her messy room

But hidden beneath
The laziness her mother sees
Is the reason why she always sleeps
She’s tired.
Tired of living
Tired of fighting
Tired of pretending
Tired of everything

Her mother is wondering
Why there’s always an empty seat
Where her daughter is supposed to be
But she never dares to ask
Just scrapes her daughter’s untouched plate

Then one night
Over a bridge so high
She lets out her final sigh
Before letting go of everything
The only thing that’s left from her
Is a note
A note written by shaking hands
A note soaked in teardrops
A note written to her mother

“Lazy is what you called me.
You never asked why I couldn’t move
You never asked why I was hiding all the time
You never asked why I was so tired all the time
And now you know why.”

Now her mother won’t complain
About a messy room ever again
She doesn’t even dare to enter her daughter’s bedroom
She would give anything
To hear that tired voice
Just once again.

A glass against the wall
It broke
Her skin
Slashed from within
Alcoholic disinhibition
Exposed her underlying condition
Of the urge to take, to end the days
Of a girl imperfect in every way
Waiting for a day when she didn’t wish
That she wasn’t born, she didn’t exist

How do I end?
The visceral shudder
The urge
Replaying the car crunching
Letting go of the wheel
Lying in a stream letting the water wash by
Tracing the veins in my arm with a scalpel
Red spilling out
Cleaning
Purging
Arms out, in a cross
But this one selfish
The depression runs deep
Death, the cure

All the reasons that you Want to **** yourself
Don't you ever consider the dwell.
Only if you could fall into a wishing well.  

Wasted a lifetime believing all the lies
How could you rest your head at night  

While the blade cuts from left to right on my chest I never felt just right.  

Bullets through my head
wouldn't rest  loving dread
that you pressed on my chest like the blade cutting deep like a memory.  

I don't want to breath this air  
I can't  for the  earth
All the hate just duplicates  
Like the blade through my veins.

******* on a gun

Left side:

I hate myself,
I hate the life I live
Who I’ve become
And how little recognition that I get
How much the world took and how much to the world I give
Now all that is left is the urge to **** on a gun
So that’s what my old self did

Right side:

You don’t always heal.
Sometimes,
you execute the version of yourself
that kept you breathing
but not living.

You press the barrel to your mouth —
not to die,
but to speak
a final truth
through clenched teeth.

To say:
You failed me.
To say:
You kept me small.
To say:
You let the world hollow me out
and still begged for more.

And then —
you pull the trigger.
You feel the echo,
not in blood,
but in silence.

The silence of
not hating yourself anymore.
Of not needing to be
the same person
just because they survived.

You don’t die.
You don’t run.
You just leave behind
a version of you
that had nothing left.

And that, too,
is a kind of living

You know, it's been rough.
I lost my girl, my job, my car
And I never was enough.

My refuge is gone and my heart remains yearning
But after all this time I'm still just learning
I just wish you didn't have to be a life lesson

There are two lives in my head
One is still with you
The other is dead.

They ask me, “Do you have a plan?”
I say, “I did my plan.”
They ask me, “Do you have another?”
My IV drips the same monotonous drip
And the catfish swim in it, releasing
Bubbles to my heart to fill me with
Some form of full I never feel
And I think of the Mississippi
I think of my mother's warning
Of the alligators, gar, and whirlpools
And I think that’s where my body belongs
Down in the mighty Mississippi
The great river my father played pirate on
The one whose call took him from his love
The river my grandfather built monuments to
To tame, to quell, because that’s what a man does
Stolen land and water, polluted by him
I think of how soft the mud must be
A cushioned pillow for my bones to rest
Crowned with cattails and pondweed
How the water might fill me like the bubbles
From my IV drip, drip, dripping
And the catfish smiles at me, his whiskers
Gleaming in the artificial fluorescence
Of the suicide watch room lights
They say, “Drowning is the worst way to go”
But I smile, and I say to them and the catfish
“I think that’s where my body belongs”