my mind through
a garbage disposal
wrung out to dry
on barbed wire

the terrifying thing
is this:
its all in my head
no one else can hear
what's happened,
what's happening

I want to
search for new ways
of forgetting

convincing myself it is all
a creation of my
sick mind

a work of art
from my imagination
a ghost I choose
to believe in

I wish I wrote the way I think;
passionately,
obsessively,
with fervent desperation

each line
like a gasp of air

writing to the point of
asphyxiation.
writing myself into a
cold panic

narrative snaking out of
my neurological pathways like
vinery into unremitting
nothing

unloving begins
with the setting of the sun,
with the falling of the tides.

I realized how accustomed
I had grown to the feeling;
of wind on my skin,
of hailstones falling.

Alphabetized, my many names.
A blurred face
in a hallway of mirrors.

my heart left long before
my body did,
long before my legs
had the strength for escape

unloving begins
with your heart feeling cold.
I thought I should stay a while,
just to be
sure.

flatten your tongue
slip it between your teeth

n.

your little lips
forming an elipsis

o.

put them together
and may you declare
a word you’d so carefully deny—
no.

you spell it out
on table tops
shout it
from the rooftops

and when cursed hands
seek to defile your shrine
may you exclaim
"i am mine"

Bury myself in subtext
- in metaphors and allusions

two way mirrors,
painted black as moonless night,
eyes closed,
lips cracked

And bleeding from these secrets,
that keep aiming to
elude the thoughtless

Mouth forever unlocking
to eat its victims,
to swallow the flesh
and spit out the bones

the familiar feeling burns my throat,
and no matter how hard I
try,
I cannot swallow the sensation

It is stuck there and it
seems like I am choking,
suffocating

I am spiraling downwards into
the darkness.
It envelopes me,
silently laughing at me.

The blackness is
all I know,
and I welcome it with
open arms.
It numbs me.

And I am stuck here
because I cannot explain,
cannot put into words ,
how the inky tendrils that
coil around my mind,
blossom into something
far more dangerous in the
pit of my soul.

What is a costume?
What masks do we put on
at the beginning of each day,
just to shed as we walk through the door?

Our front doors become the cleansing cloth,
that strips away the deceptive pretense
of our sense of selves
that we create for the outside world to see

these costumes however,
create barriers.

We hesitate to say what intimacy is,
and whether or not we have it

But what is intimacy
when our relationships are built on
a foundation of
convention.

What is intimacy
when we train our entire lives
to play a masterful game of pretend.