Slanted
Why do I slide?
Slide down a rabbit hole, Alice's hole, Layne's hole
A burial of open air, dirt imagined, smothering the thought
that slipping into any other pool besides this self-administered poison
is directed squarely at others, not me, oh god not me.
A brain's bitterness more toxic than vinegar on the tongue
Misery that slimes, oozes, creeps, and constricts every thought
My thoughts, not my own, converting my hands to someone else's
And I watch. Trapped. Sliding down the now speeding *****.
That which stalked and surprised, but I cannot blame.
Cannot predict. Cannot battle. I'm slanted.
Slated to slip down slides of sloth, slowly.
Shredding into sharpening shouts, shifting into panic.
Pleas. Please. Pleasing Pleas.
Can't cope, can't cut, can't control.
Wait. At the bottom is a light.
But whether to heaven or hell
This purgatorial slide carries me all the way
Slanted.
A poem I wrote on the verge of a panic attack. The formatting when I wrote it is quite literally "slanted", and angled diagonally down the page, and the lines were not spaced out. It was stream of consciousness and I had no time to consider poetic merit. I've had to incorporate phrasing based on afterthought. The vast majority of these poems have non-coherent thoughts included in them, and I'm only posting ones that could be seen as still somewhat cogent.
**Layne in this poem is of course a reference to Layne Staley. I had a roommate at this time who played a beautiful cover of the Alice in Chains song "Nutshell, that I was obsessed with.**