he puts concentrated, constant effort into every day.
he has no choice, and you can see it in his face.
it looks rough. it looks like work and worry.
it looks like inexplicable failure.
it looks like mine.
I look away.

Sometimes I open my eyes to find my room darker than I remember,
and sometimes I dream that I have murdered,
I dream that I am careless.
Sometimes I open my eyes to find my room emptier than I remember.

Weird girl, weird girl. She is sorry she opened her eyes.

My cat's name is Zachary Binx, and I know for a fact he could kick my *** in a fight. His claws are daggers. They are needle sharp and feather light and designed to ensnare and then shred anything his long, quick arms can ******. He is fast; he is a predator.
But he has no idea, because his environment suggests otherwise. He's artificially coerced by domestication to assume that his survival is dependent on me. He is designed to survive on his own, but his cage suggests otherwise.
So he contents himself to the role of the housecat, sitting on the windowsill, feeling dull pangs of inexplicable deja vu as he watches the sparrows bathe in the dirt outside.

I spent years looking for ways
to shut the voice up
and now that it's worked
I'm more alone,
more empty
than I've ever been.
I thought I would know myself
when I quieted myself
and now the silence  inside
is driving me insane.


Will she ever come back?

There is nothing inside
and yet
the body convulses,
gagging out useless sounds
empty air,
and it is poetry,
it is art
if you give it a title.

how the **** do I
say it say it say it please,
SIR
It has been said.
Scream all you want.
I was never for a moment afraid
that words would fail me.
It never occurred to me  that one day
there would be nothing to say.
I have something to say.
It is a sound. It is a feelingthoughtbreathtoneimagemoment
it is lost in the timespace
internal,
I have murdered the grammatical fiction,
alas! I drowned her by accident,
I am Bigger Thomas
I am Mary Dalton
I am no one and nothing, I am dead.
I am alive, and that is troublesome again.

I have given up on
getting up because
giving up hurts less,
yes?
New lines, old news
as ugly as anything else I saw coming
because I knew like I knew
but seeing it in the mirror is,
well,
that's new news.
I reject it as part of F2,
a mental plane I must have wandered to infinity
back before they scared me into pinning myself to cork,
abandoned on a broken pane of the looking glass
babbling and reeling among mirages of
empty fields and cotton gins.
I used to collect shards of broken bottles,
mined them up from the red dirt at the steps of
the old abandoned church. I called them
my diamonds, and I had a whole jar full,
and I was ******* somebody, then,
with my jar of diamonds
and my white hair
and even then I think I knew
like I knew
there is no new.
I have memories of a dead woman seated upright
in a rocking chair in that church,
bathed in bare sunlight from holes in the shingles,
the day my grandmother and I dared sneak past
peeling paint and rusted hinges,
the day we found the typewriter.
The dead woman was covered in dust,
navy-blue rags hanging from bones,
crisp white hair draped across
used-to-be shoulders.
I knew she had been there all along;
I know she is there still. She told them all,
'They will come,' like she knew that she knew,
and we knew that she knew, so we did.

I don't know what I'm doing,
but it feels a lot like asphyxiation.
In the middle of the nighttime
amber-lit and silent street,
barefoot on wet asphalt,
the lightning strikes and for a moment I see
the trees illuminated and remember
how grand and endless the world used to seem,
how the sky was still, to me, mystery.

The rain picks up to remind me
that it sees me there, and does not care.
I am small against the sky, and
the careless lightning has offended me and '
the trees seem so cold,
so swollen and heavy with rainwater,  
that my hands cover my ears
and I run for cover but without sound I am
unbalanced as a cat without whiskers and I
fall into a puddle
and drown.