Can one be filled up with non-things?
Electrons in a shell, their negative charges
dense and balanced,
a double negative --
What is the opposite of a blank space
and why is it so thick with hurt?

                        Obsession.
      A binary.
Everything or nothing,
dead or so frighteningly alive.
        
                           Fear.
      A lingering.
You are the author of all your failures,
and you cannot escape their weight.
            
                           Disgust.
       A constant.
A grub worm gorges itself below the surface.
The maggot and vulture feed on rot.

                             Apology.
        A tradition.
If you were really sorry you wouldn't have done it, and
certainly wouldn't have done it twice.

Sharp, empty sky is a dread blue eye
looking at everything but you.
You feel like the only thing that exists, but really,
your'e the only thing here that doesn't.
The wind would rather talk to itself
than speak your breathless name.

You set out to build a fence
to prove to the dead sky that you exist
and oh, the building felt so good
that only once you'd finished the work
did you realize where you stood.

It is quiet on your side, a soundless expanse;
Are you proud, you languageless savage?
Does your silence feel like vindication?
Or does your heart start to tremble,
do your lungs start to burn,
when you look across the fenced and quartered plains
and see you've strung barbed wire across the only passage home?
There it broods familiar on the horizon, and must you stand removed
until it collapses, or will you ****** your pride to save it?
What's worse, being fenced in, or fenced out?

Terrified of both, terrified of it all, of the certainty and the uncertain,
of the loneliness and the companionship,
you set fire to the prairie, flee to the high mountains,
and hope that the sky sees you there.

It feels like I am breaking again.
(That is a lie.)
It's just that I'd forgotten that I was broken, but I'm rousing from the sleep now, and the details are coming back to me. I am falling back out of the dreamspace.
It feels like it is raining everywhere I go. It feels like there are rocks in my shoes and  nothing I do will get them out. It feels like I have shattered the gift I meant to give you, and no matter how hard I try, the cracks in the glass still show. It is ruined, do you hear me? It is worthless, and with every attempt I make to fix it I destroy another aspect of its purity. It is a paradox like everything else. I wanted it to be perfect, god ******, I knew what I was capable of and I knew what you deserved, but now hindsight's got me thinking that maybe it was broken all along, maybe I was broken all along, maybe I was wrong, all wrong.
I'm dry heaving again.
I'm trying to find a mirror out there that will return a reflection I recognize, but I keep creating fictitious images. There is no real, is there? You are not real. I was never real.
I keep wondering what's going on in all the caves I didn't get lost in. I keep wondering what it was that pushed me into this one. I have memories of falling, nothing else. I landed here. I was an explorer before that, I think, or at least I think I thought I was, wait, who am I again? Who are. . .
we?
When I was fifteen someone told me it was okay, that I just didn't know what I wanted. And I guess I believed them, because I've accepted it as a part of me, the not-knowing. I know less and less each day.
I think I'm looking for a reader, maybe, one who's forgiving and bored, one who's willing to overlook the dullness of the style and forget the (lack of) artistic merit and read this **** like letters to a lover.
They are all letters to lovers, future and past and present,
begging pardon, apologizing. That all it's ever been. I'm just trying to make myself understood, and wouldn't you know it, all I've achieved is obfuscation. Once it is broken, it cannot be fixed. I should have known that I've always known. The cracks will always show. The rain will never stop. There is no such thing as perfect.
I am sorry.

Will I always wish I were dead?
When I am dead, what will I wish then? Will I still dream?
Will I remain unsatisfied, forever on the cusp of whatever,
that grand "else" I seek?
There are no answers. There is
nothing left to seek.
I shove a pen down my throat and ***** the trash,
rearrange it like alphabet soup and read it
like the entrails of the beast that I slaughtered
when I first opened my eyes. It reads,
"Get up. Grow up. Give up."

We are all trapped in this same cycle.
It is a tacit misunderstanding
of what it means to be a part
of the same cycle.
Out is in
back is forward
me the details of the meeting I missed
the bus last week when it was raining and the trees
are finally changing colors again, it was a late fall
into this same cycle with us
is just a word is just a
space to fill a lack.
I am just a space to fill a lack.
I am a space full of
lack.
I lack the space it would take
to feel full of anything but
this same cycle.

the **** am I
and where
the **** am I going?
Begone, get out, run until
your legs give out
Any direction, pick one,
all directions lead back home
if you're willing to run
forever.
I am, I am not.
All I know is that when I look in the mirror,
I see my mother more and more each day
and I wonder what it feels like
to never leave home, never leave home, never
find home, where am I, where?
I am gone! I am leaving! And perhaps I'll return,
if I run fast enough, if I never look up,
maybe the last face I see will
be yours.

I used to keep track of the stories, used to carry them around with me, because forgetting was scary, it was terrifying to imagine having lived and having forgotten,
"we only have what we remember", yeah, and all that
but (the shift)
at some point I wanted to forget,
and I forgot
how to remember,
and I set the stories down on a bench somewhere
like a canvas bag full of old books, they were so heavy,
and I willed myself to forget them.
I left them.
We only have what we remember,
and I want to hold nothing.
I want to open my eyes, one time,
one day, and find myself naked
and empty handed.
I want to remember again, and the first thing I'll go looking for
is the feeling of waking, weightless,
without the comedown crash of consciousness,
that 'oh yeah', that 'oh, that'.
I am afraid the canvas will never be clean again.
I am afraid that the damage has been done.
I can't remember where I left my books.
I may never find them.