Dreamer, dreamer,
you always wake up as if you haven't slept,
and all it is that you've kept...
the fatigue of your trials,
the soreness of your miles,
the torment of the lifestyles.

Your sleep is all dreams,
stemming out from your river of life like streams.
You dream of everything that you can't do,
and what the world deems impossible.
Incomprehensible,
to everyone but you.

Dreamer, dreamer,
is there anyone to watch over you in your slumber?
They could give you a number,
of the hours of your rest.
It's long enough to slip into dreaming,
but lately it's seeming,
not enough to give you energy.

Dreamer, dreamer,
if you ever sleep enough, if you ever don't dream,
you'll notice the fatigue doesn't go away,
but you hope it will anyway.

You're scared to find out,
so you keep on restricting your time in bed,
even though it's slowing down your head.
I don't have a doubt,
you're tired beyond dreaming.

Dreamer, dreamer,
there are things to take for your rest.
You try your best,
oh dreamer, you do,
but there are some things you just can't do.

Dreamer, dreamer,
how do you do it?

You are not quite yet up in years,
but to your ears:
familiar are the faded tunes, dripping from the radio like soda from bottles you didn't quite close,
tapping from your stiff foot.

On the asphalt you walk barefoot,
because we walk barefoot where we live.
You are alive where you drive.

You are not quite yet up in years,
but in your ears:
sound declines
like each hill you descend in the fifty-two miles of wild between us,
and you ignore the posted signs
telling you to quiet the roaring and whipping of wind in your busted windows,
telling you to slow the tearing and straining of your tires.

On the asphalt and off, you know how to set fires,
because your late old man and your unseen mother taught you how.
You may not know, but I see how you deepen your brow.

Old Blue has more troubles that you may care to admit,
because she can only just make it.

Neither of you are quite up in your years,
and still I have my fears,
but they are not tears,
because you
and Old Blue
take us where we can get lost
and not feel the loss.

Can you feel the power coursing through you,
disguised as adrenaline,
when you swing your arm and before the blow even hits,
you feel all your anger and frustration fade, so now all you want is to fight?
You wanna kick and pitch a fit,
till your old ****** arms
are covered up by new scars,
but nothing like that matters because you're the last man standing.
Maybe the other boy, curled up on the ground now
with his arms thrown over his head,
broke your nose and made it even more crooked than before,
but you're the little freak who no one thought could win.
But you entered in
from a world where everyone called you ****
to be the freak who everyone only saw as a ****,
thin-shouldered and quieter than the boys he fought.

Maybe your quietness and meek, weak, malnourished look fooled you and all of them,
for look into your eyes in the mirror and see the gold and brown fighting through the green sheen,
the fire for everything you hate, all the things you're hitting and spitting on when you're through with them,
and when you stare into your own eyes you might recognize yourself.

Don't be fooled, boy, you're weak and you're sick,
your arms aren't thick
which muscle and dark hair,
and nothing about you is real,
with fabricated reactions and premeditated sentences,
all programmed into your brain, which fights itself in its confusion,
screaming, and smoking from the fight with itself, about what should be happening with your emptiness and with your bony chest.

Boy, you're hardly that,
just a *** who stares after the other guys,
but you're not sure if you're gay, because you really just want to be just like them.
Boy, at least you fall for pretty girls,
shorter and daintier than you, with more mellow hearts but stronger emotions,
and passions for poetry (not the kind you possess, rooted in your inability for expressions)
and always with love for another boy, a real boy to grow into a man.

Vibrant colors flood through the engravings in my skeleton,
the bright lights shining through my skin,
along every nerve as they illuminate themselves to make known their pain.
What a useless light show,
that nobody asked for,
telling everybody in vain
that it wants to be released.

I can wipe away tears
and wrap my arms around a friend
to comfort him
when I am saying goodbye to someone I have known since the day I was born
but I cannot hide the turmoil so well
when I crouch on the bedroom floor
packing for him
getting ready to live without him.

I want to feel.
I want to cry again at night
so I can't lose sight
of what matters.

I want to feel.
I want to be happy even when I'm not empty
so that I can be so happy I'm as nice as can be.

I want to feel.
I want to be so angry that I can cut myself
without needing to make up a reason
for just wanting to see myself become a ****** mess.

I want to feel.
I want to feel so much terror
at seeing myself again
that I keep fighting until Monday,
and the next,
and the next,
until I can't keep living.

Shot in his ribs;
he cries,
"Oh the dis-familiarity
of such a name,
oh the cruelty
of such a pain,
oh the game
of such a vain
and ugly creature,
who slinks toward me!"

Flower face,
always so warmly bathed in the sun of the East Coast,
with such soft cheeks and swamp eyes,
stagnant and wet with little creatures inside.
They're talking to me,
saying things about why I love you,
or if I even do.

Little flower face,
it makes me ache
all over,
in my muscles and my bones,
when I think of your soft petals and long draping stalks.

I wanna pat the sandy earth into place around you on nights like these
when I can imagine the warm breeze
coming in through your open window despite the cold around me
delivering a freeze
to **** all the plants
and transform this world into something so different from your reality.

He wished to be one,
but stronger than he, the laws
governing his body.

Do you remember all the times you said you hate me?
Do you remember all those times you said you didn't care?

Mama, I promise I'll do better.
I'm quite sorry, or don't you see?
Mama, I promise this is the last time
that I make you so mad we lose our hair.
Mama, I promise I'll be more like my sisters,
and I'll be everything you want.
Mama, I promise I've always been here.
You're putting this all out on your kids.
Now, how is that fair?
Mama, I hate this way that we live.

Mama, I always hear you.
I hear you saying,
"You're a monster;
there's not enough going on in your head to distract you!
You're such a *******."
I feel wrong saying you abuse this family,
especially since others have it worse,
but now I hear everyone saying it,
so I admit it at least a little bit.

Mama, I'm calling him Isaac,
and I'm calling myself David.
I'll never come out to you,
because you're just that predictable
that I know just what you'd do.

Hear the proclamation of Isaac,
everyone we know who knows you thinks you're insane.
Hear the proclamation of Isaac,
people are offering to call someone on you
and take us away.
Hear the proclamation of Isaac,
we know you cannot change,
but it doesn't redeem you.

Mother, a specialist has called us,
he believes something is wrong, astray, askew,
but you tell me it's all no reason to fuss.
Mother, your words have caught onto me like the flu.
Mother, you're infecting me to become you.

Father, mother says we cannot go,
to neither the recommended counseling nor therapy,
and for some reason you agree,
but just yesterday you told me,
you resent what she has done to your children.

Mother, I am sorry you have overheard what I've told my dad.
I promise, I never meant to make you sad,
but now you're screaming that I'm glad.
Mother, I do not rejoice!
Please, stop putting these words in my mouth! It is your choice!

Mother, this ordeal can end.
Remember, you were once my friend?
Mother, I know I have grown to fourteen and now I should be more kind and more mature.
Still, you say, I am just mean and for my cold eyes and empty heart, there is no cure.
Mother, your words shape my world, despite my hesitance to believe them.

Mother, I am sorry that I sobbed three years ago because of your screams.
Mother, I am sorry that I turned my back on you while we both fell through countless seams.
Mother, forgive me, please, for I try my best and I am your daughter.
Mother, forgive me, please, for I try my best and I am not my father.

Father, I miss your defense.
But to expect your words in my good chance again is dense.
Father, I have made every excuse I can to make you the favorite parent.
But, father, my lies to myself are apparent.
Father, what happened to the days when your guarded this wretched child of myself from mother's verbal onslaught?
Forever I would have you for forever, I thought.

Father, you will die soon, because you do not care for your body.
Father, I cannot live without you beside me and my family.
Father, protect my brothers and my sisters just a few more years.
Father, don't leave me again yet. You are not him, do not run for a few more beers.

Mother, you brought to me an alcoholic.
Mother, you brought to me his precious child.
Mother, with this baby, now nearly four years old, I still frolic.
My beloved little sister.
But mother, the drunkard threatens to come to us again.
If he tries in court to steal my cherished sister, can we win?

Rapacious alcoholic, with each and every bone in my body, for you, I feel such loathing.

There are no words for the songs plucked out on the heartstrings
of the melancholy man with deeply sad eyes,
but he sings those songs to the stormy skies
through the tears rolling down his craggy cheeks into the world's oceans,
and those same tears slipping off of the barely beating wings of the tired wrens.

He thinks himself a strange man,
with not a single instrument to his name,
yet known as a musician,
and he breaths out in cold clouds his sorrow,
but the sparrows,
those little birds, let his breaths of freezing billow
roll off of them as easily as the starlight that the sad man can't see.

What a man, so heavyhearted,
who does not know how to play his own heartstrings like a harp,
how to play his heart like a drum,
how to play his brittle ribs like piano keys,
so heavyhearted that he cannot bear to give anything else the weight to exist,
so heavyhearted that the rest of him blows away and he is but a heart,
old and cheerless, without its own reason to exist.

Tear, tear, tear.
Spend classes tearing paper into tiny bits.
Why do I do it?
(Tearing until my fingers hurt.)

Count, count, count.
Almost run into people every few minutes.
Why do I do it?
(Count my bones whenever I can.)
(Count the steps on the stairs when I ran.)
(Count the steps I take and how many breaths I draw.)

I am aware that everyone sees me,
counting and tearing and restarting,
and I don't want to stop even though it's not with a degree of panic.

Check, check, check.
Check so many things again and again,
but not the things that are really important.
(Check that everything's not changing or if it is.)

Dizzying intoxication,
torturous obsession,
what could a fourteen-year-old know about addiction?

It never stops,
for one,
it's like an ugly mythological cyclops,
with an eye only for a prize,
wishing it had two eyes,
so it could see more of the world.

Dizzying intoxication,
torturous obsession,
hooked on clenching jaws,
riding on the high of fixing each of the wicked flaws,

Who said that this is not an addiction?
A terrifying one, but maybe they all are...
Addicted to pain of emptiness, both physical and mental,
leaving nasty scar upon nasty scar.

I regret falling to the addiction,
of sick and thin,
but like I said, I'm here to win,
so I'll succumb to addiction...

Sometimes I want to take her up in my arms
and feel like a man,
because I'm a lot bigger than her
and my hands dwarf hers,
but we both know I can't.

My heart rises up to my throat
when I think of her
and it swells from the love I hold so dear
and it breaks when I remember that I can't be close to her.

I'm not close enough to stroke her knotted hair,
and I'm not close enough to make sure nobody hurts her.
She can protect herself sometimes, and I know she isn't hurt as Much as I am angry when she is insulted.

Their jokes about me loving her hardly seem like jokes now,
and I might just be a bit high on pain or hunger or maybe it's just the lonely hurt,
but I want to hold her
and love her,
but I have to know that it isn't possible.
A love between us is impossible,
however much I wish I could be a man to her, for her, just to simply be
for her.

There are red makes etched imto my flesh,
and I am finding it harder to breathe afresh
underneath the layers of painful bandages.
Still my ribs ache and sting when they push through my skin, but can't push through that final layer hiding me.
I can't comcentrate on the lessons,
the words are a blur and the faces are obscured by tears,
but I will not stop because the pain of facing my body is even worse.

Everyone is shouting in my ears,
pulling them and stretching them to ensure I really hear,
but it goes in that ear and out the other.
If this means broken ribs and sickness,
then so be it,
because still the pain will be worth it.

I remember my dreams of a holy place,
a library where I ran, just a little boy with other boys,
with a great stained glass window filling up the space
on the pointed ceiling above the sacred text
that left me perplexed
and mouthing a few syllables when I could understand,
and wishing to feel the soft cloth on my head,
over a short haircut that I didn't have.

I can't truly say if it was a dream,
but I remember walking outside into the desert with those little boys, feeling jealous of their kippahs,
and eventually we stopped at what I thought might be like a stream,
but was only a canal in the wasteland.
The tumbleweeds whispered and rattled,
but no snakes slid out of them with a tail that rattled quite the same.

I grew up though, far away now,
with the heavy weight of knowledge on my back
and the feeling of sweat on my brow.
I have heard a lot, and that soundless world where I spent all of my time looking and none of my time listening
is gone. I listen and I look now,
and I tell a girl about my observations
while she marvels and tells me what to do with them,
but there is nothing much to become
when despite my ambition
I hold myself back with the most unholy things.

A black snake coiled itself around him last night,
until it rolled him 'round and 'round with his legs kicking
and he nodded off into sleep with his eyes teary and his ribs aching from the fight.
The great serpent eased up around him,
but once more in the day and well into the next night,
it constricted his bones to the point of breaking,
and through the lies and false promises of the reptile
he cried and cursed his life, his birth, his body.

I love you,
and I'm so happy for you
for telling everyone who you are,
or I wish I could feel happy for you and our friend,
but I am filled with longing to see you,
and I want to tell you that I dream of doing everything for you,
of loving you,
and just of being near you.

God, I make it hard for myself to breathe,
driving my confused fists into my ribs,
willing them to stick out and be so brittle I hear them break.
I want them to break by someone else's hands,
so I have a legitimate reason to be hurting,
and so I have a real reason to break into the night alone and weeping.
I can breath again, and I once again feel that love for you and know I want to run eight hundred miles to you.
I know that I would never run into your arms, but I would love to see you again.

I long to hold out my arms on the door to let your through
and see you walk under them, because you're short enough.
I wish I could see you smile and I'd see the color of your braces and your lips stretch thin.
I want to see your smile again.
I want to look at your long hair, and I want to know everything about you.
I want to make everyone know that you should be loved,
and that I might love you.

God, I can feel my bones trapping me here,
but I want to be there.
I don't want to be here, hiding bruises and cuts and bones,
and lying about love and lying about my life.
I would give my body and life to be near your,
maybe even if you hated me.

I want to protect you,
I want to love you,
but you have others to do it for me,
and I will probably never see, hear, smell or touch you again,
but I will be thinking about you for years,
remembering.

The little boy in gray doesn't smile often,
and his breathing is so shallow,
they may ask again,
"are you sure that he is breathing? Are you sure that he's alive?"
and rest assured his body's trying
to keep him alive
despite how much he breaks it down
and watches nonchalantly as it drowns.

He longs for poison to taint his blood
and strengthen the walls that creep up around him
(those ugly weeds that stole the color of the ground
and choked out the bound
to be life that would have sprung up at his feet).

He constricts himself like a snake,
and lets himself bleed,
as if all this hurt was not by his hands (callused and uneven and scraped down to bone),
he still cries
as the water rushes down his back
and stings his dull eyes.
He still cries when the hunger grips him and won't let go
even though
he did all this.

The little boy in gray ignores all of this
and continues in his silence
to the outside world,
for he is one among many,
and those others are so worthy.

Weightless
in the lapping waves
Careless
in the sensation
of the quiet kissing of tears off your cheeks

My feet were splintered and cracked from crawling in the broken trees,
but still I stood and stared through the wooden beams
to see far below me, to gaze into the eyes of the howling beasts.

I hoped desperately that they not see me,
but their heads flashed upwards and their tongues pulled me from my perch.
I could hear every word now, trapped underneath their fumbling feet.
They moved slowly over me, working meticulously.

I waited for the evening, when the dying rays of the sun sank into the tile from the doorway,
and when they would vanish melt into the darkness of his shadow.
I wait and wait some days, but they never melt just right,
instead only turning the whole world into night.

His shadow doesn't arrive sometimes for days and nights,
sometimes, though, it takes months and once a year,
but every day I long to hear,
his rough and Southern drawl,
whether it be telling me that I am queer
or small.

Most days I do not care what it is he'll do or say,
I only care that he is there, and that he will make the monsters go away.

Maybe I'm shooting in the dark.
Maybe I'm shooting at something that's not really there.
It doesn't feel fair
that I have to be
such a lousy shot.

I'm not a robot.
I'm not calculating.
I'm not cold and defining.

I might be running through rivers of black ink.
I might be breathing in the noise.
I might be doing anything at all, but I don't think
I could fail to notice.

I'm not just ignorant,
I know what's happening,
but I can't admit anything at all.
I'd rather fall

into the staining, screaming streams
that claw at my callused feet.
I'm running
with no street
to follow.

The shining ink's close
to me, but it's not
how I want to go.

I really am flailing at nothing,
but I realize
I was never breathing words,
I was breathing in these thick and heavy woods.

I can't keep running.
I've destroyed that part of myself.
I keep the perfect things on a shelf
where I can't reach them.

Please, tell me again
how I am not breathing in
your words like oxegyn.

My lifeline, my lifeline.
I can't find it.
I'm drowning, I'm drowning.

Pulling muscle and
refusing to keep it down
preparing to drown.

We haven’t spoken since March.
Now, isn’t that perfectly depressing?
I think about it a lot.
I think about it while I stare out of the bus windows,
While I let everything rush in and pile on top of me…
the images and trees flitting by…
the flashes of memories of your face, your smile, and your voice.

Everything about you is right beside me,
but I know you’re not really here.
You would never stay around me this long, right, friend?
I’d stay beside you, right there…
maybe forever, if that’s what you need.

Your ungainly hug still leaves warm spots on my shoulders and my side.
I swear that I can still feel you leaning against me.
I know I can still feel the painful knot in my throat, which I tried to hide.
Your embrace:
it made me feel shorter than you, even though we were the same height,
and it made me feel warm even though I was cold,
when it was around eighty degrees Fahrenheit.
It almost made me happy, but I also wanted to cry.
Because it was making me really see that I was saying goodbye.

You didn't really think of anyone else,
but who am I supposed to blame?
Yeah, you may not find fame,
you may not really smile,
and I know that with this
hell's only growing for us.

I can feel fire with the knot in my throat,
when he says I should not have my own thoughts and opinions,
especially not in these conditions,
cause I know you gotta escape.

Yeah, hell's about to get so much worse,
and I am about to get so much more terse,
but it's for you so I hope this pays off.

Parfois je fonds en larmes
quand tu me dit que
je ne sais pas que je suis.

Je suis suivi mon ombre en les rues
quand j'ai souhaité pour voir l'homme je veux etre,
et je suis suivi mon ombre sur les murs
quand j'ai souhaité pour la me couvrir.

Meet me one day in the inky black shadow
when the ground is speckled with the sprinkling of the glaring flow
to bathe ourselves into warmth with the sacred, shining, golden ichor.

The sky burst its vein on the jagged peaks on the horizon,
so let us cherish its blood
and lay on our backs among the buds
until we wizen
in the flood.

I'm digging my words up out of the books,
flinging them over my shoulders like dirt
as they lift from the page and flit in and out of my eyes,
barely keeping me concious.

I try to fill up my gut
with the gritty syllables that I can't actually hear,
flung up from the holes in words,
between pages,
between worlds.

I press my fingerprints into the fine, aging paper,
knowing it will help me later
to cover up the void I'm filling with words.

Maybe if I can force my eyes to stop staring at sideways spines
and straightup people looking just fine,
I can make myself focus in the scent of the decay wafting up from between the words,
or I can make myself read between the lines,
instead of struggling to read the blurry spines
that I can't help but watch.

Once upon a time,
I taught myself to rhyme.

I would hum as I tried to climb,
and though the branches beneath my feet were hard,
from the ground by them I was barred,
and their marred bark seemed to melt into a part of me.

I taught myself to rhyme
when I lay awake at night,
and wished I could take flight.

Cough up your lungs and cough up your guts,
and heal up your cuts!
Sickness wracks your body,
your ribs show when you cough and gag.
Hold up your white flag,
because you surrender to the infection.

You're cut open and sewed shut,
prepare yourself for rejection.
You can't handle another infection.
Surgery can't fix you up inside,
this disease isn't attacking anywhere a doctor can reach,
nor any speech.

You're in ill health,
that creeps up with great stealth.
Your sickness is using your tongue
to choke out each lung,
while lying
and denying
that you're sick.

Throw the white sheets over your head,
you'll be with the dead,
because you have to surrender to the infection!
let it reside within your midsection,
because it will achieve perfection!

From a mouth tasting sour from an empty stomach, and whispering from dry, cracked lips, comes desperate pleas.
Perhaps they beg for silence, or simply to be heard, but either way no desert will speak and each mouth is certainly one of these.
Each tongue is white and wrung out, then hung out to dry.
There are still always screams, and the sound of fighting, so speakers must settle to merely cry.

From red eyes, with vibrant and bright irises and endless pupils, tears threaten to slip mutely down sunken cheeks.
Silent criers with departed, desensitized beacons embedded in their faces do not plea for help nor quiet to reflect their own demeanor.
Simply secreting their eyes, they wish to see no more.
Oh, they've seen too much to continue watching!
So they press their hands to their sockets and let their tears continue splotching.

From hands, with scarred knuckles and only callused skin, there slip the tears that forced their ways between eyelids.
Something terrifying, opposing grabs at small palms and nimble fingers.
Hands tugging and pulling, they escape their bane.
Hands shaking and numbing, they begin to dull the pain.

And in their brain, chemicals and hormones cry out for the body and the mind to stop racing,
but their body image and their self esteem and worth are rapidly defacing.
Oh, this act of suicide is quite technically a crime.

Some kid I don't even know is my hero
because he called me "he" when he doesn't even know me
and everyone else scares me
because they're constantly mocking all us ******* trannies,
saying we shouldn't exist,
because we're liars and delusional.

I can't stand people who says they're like me
just because they don't conform,
because they're not.
Not conforming isn't the same
as letting everyone see you and call you "it" and "******" and saying they hate people like you,
and not being able to breathe because you've got too beaten up by yourself hiding something
and wanting to die but only not doing it because you can't stand for a single person to talk about it with "she" on their minds.

I used to say I hated dresses and pink and all that girly **** when I was young not because I always did but because I couldn't stand anyone calling me the girly girl,
and then I always played sports, I fought and wrestled and kicked off my shoes for soccer to show the guys I was tough,
I was one of them,
and when they said I was just like them
I skipped and cried at home from happiness.

I don't believe in any god, or heaven or hell,
but I pray with all my heart
that I could have been born as someone else.
Even though I hate to feel jealous, I usually do not,
I wish so desperately that I could be any number of guys I see.

Quelquefois l’homme dans moi est la raison que je veux mourir.
Il brûle mes poumons, mais il me trempe dans l’eau alors je brûle à l’intrieur seulement,
mais l’eau me noie et mélange avec la bile en la gorge.

Il se fend les pieds sur ma cage thoracique.
Il les pousse ensemble.
Quand je marche, l’homme me bat de m’interieur.
Il me bat le corps.

Il est la raison que je me penche et tousse toutes choses.
Il est la raison que je cogne moi-même (pour je se bats.)
Il est la raison que je mords moi-même (pour je se bats.)

Your name rests on my tongue,
and I know you are my brother,
but deep in my chest where I know there should be an ache,
I can't feel much of anything.
Our friend misses you
when I can't properly manage to.

People keep talking about how things are better without you,
and it makes me angry
especially when I think about the act she put on when she woke up that morning.

I picked up that little red book,
and I put it back ten minutes later with shaking hands.

I dug my nails into my palms,
and I seethed with the knowledge I ignored.

I think about everything I lied about for you,
all the secrets I kept without you even knowing,
and all the things I endured,
because I love you
even though you left.

Yeah, you left at your first real chance,
and you didn't think about who you were leaving,
you just told me to lie for you,
and I did it.
I turned around and lied to everyone,
and now I have to pretend it's all fine.

I smash my skull against the wall
when I hear you call
that name as if it is mine
because every day it hurts a little bit worse
and the realization sinks in that I will never be who I feel I am.

<<FRANÇAIS>>

J'entends seul les mots des chaisons,
et je vois seul les mots des livres.
Les mots sont beux et grands !

Je me remplis avec ces mots,
et en ces mots je vais s'évader !


<<ESPAÑOL>>

Escucho solo las palabras de la música,
y veo solo las palabras de los libros.
¡Las palabras estan bellas y grande!

Me lleno com las palabras,
y en las palabras me escaparé !


<<ENGLISH>>

I hear these words in music,
I see these words in books.
The words are beautiful and great!

I fill myself with words,
and in these words I am going to escape!

I'm sweating like hell
even though it's cold as hail
then she says, "hey, David"
and I can't even tell
how I got this happy.

His lungs seemed chilly inside his burning chest,
and he coughed up the steam and smoke,
but up and about him the oak
forest did not stir, did not bend and creak to hold a leafy hold around the guest.

His eyes felt frozen open inside his flushed, fevered face,
and he couldn't tell where his body ended and the cold world began.
The pace
of his heart rose and fell again.

Please don't ever ******* touch me.
Please don't ever ******* touch me because I'll snap.
Please don't hug me because we both know it's empty.
Please don't ever ******* touch me until it's to hurt me or **** me.

A handkerchief
I usually call it a bandanna
made to hide away
******* round to look natural
but I know it's not usual...

I swear tonight is just a memory
A bad memory with the same old soundtrack
seeping into my ears to tell me
to finally feel despite the setback
to maintaining secrecy

I swear tonight is a memory
or several
but this is reality
and only my denial will change that
so it is time I start lying to myself

I wish that everything was just a memory
but I don't think I am creative enough to make this dark story
or to feel the stinging so clearly

i wish i wasn't aware of myself most of the time
cause what good comes from all this hating and hurting
and struggling to mime
who i wish i was but who i'll never be

i can keep on pulling a dark jacket over my head
and walking in two lines
but no matter what i always end up here in bed
not sleeping, not crying, not dreaming
just listening to my own rehearsed lines

and in the morning when i wake up
i'll feel fine until it's time to get dressed again
and i'll see the veins in my arms and remember them opening
and i'll see that the hair over them is fine and white,
because no matter how hard i try
i'll never be who i think i am

i might dream when i fall asleep
about that man who i could have been
but i'll wake up again
wishing i hadn't
and thinking about how i can stop the sunrise from shining in from outside
without making it sink below the horizon every day

Pulling muscle and
refusing to keep it down
preparing to drown.

Some nights you wake up when it’s still dark
to bat at the breath in your ear.
You beckon into the shadows, so stark,
but you cannot hear
the sound that enticed you to hark.

You turn over onto your side,
making an attempt to hide
from the sounds and sights of the night,
but it is an already lost fight.

So close by is the turning of a bolt,
so dangerous and frightening is the jolt
that runs down your back with the slimy, dead hand,
you cover your eyes and wish it to end.

The window is latched,
but the bones pop and the paint now scratched,
so the breeze carries your blanket off of your back.
The glass is open just a crack,
but something crawls closer, really to hack.

Long and morphed are the fingerprints,
but are lost in the blitz
of stained and runny, ******, walls,
and away he crawls.

You've tried everything in the book,
but nothing ever seems to work
you just can't achieve that long-desired look.
Let it all flow out in artwork,
if no one else will look at you like that.

If I look hard enough
into the setting sun
dark will bleed my eyes
out into the through
till so full of sights it will run
into the ground.

Give me the courage to alter my mind;
give me the tolerance to revamp what has been intertwined,
deep within the tangle of my twisted heart and my aberrant judgement.
I need the diligence to become what people wish, and become content
with simply being as they want.
It will not matter: the severity of my becoming gaunt.

I need your truthful words,
untouched by filthy lies,
flying from your mouth like graceful and pure birds.

With your speech,
tell me I can change!
My filthy, mendacious walls, you breach,
with the promise that I will change.

Strip the cloth off of my scarred skin,
to show me what has been,
of scarred and bruising flesh,
so that I can feel it afresh.
A reminder that I must become something else.

Please talk to me again so that I can remember who I am torturing myself for.
Give me more- give me more-
more- more of a reminder!
For you, I'll be a beggar,
begging on the road for you to repair my soul,
begging for you to make me whole.

On this morning there was nothing to wake for,
no eyes peeking around the corner,
no hand waving from the dented metal door,
no warm voice to greet me,
no friends to see.

It was not so different than any other day,
because every other day I wake the same.
The little one sleeps on,
since it is barely dawn.
And... her... aging hands are more troubled applying crap
to her to perfect her rap
than to waving or signaling a single care about us.
And his presence was once again lacking but I will wait until he is not busy
because he at least arrives and wants to see me.

Quite alone, sometimes it seems,
especially when I remember that most kids have friends and dates or sometimes a job or a fortune,
but I spend my time unsupervised, supervising, and trying to run my life,
when my mother cannot be bothered to care when it does not make her look better.

I'm burying my own words as best I can,
but as soon as I have set the ban,
down in a hole beneath filthy tongues
twisted from lies and sour-breathed pulling,
you make my blood boil.

You whisper about me, I can hear it,
behind the book shelf,
between the narrow isles of stories.

This place could offer me sanctuary,
but you came along,
and you are every noise, breath, sight and smell.
I cannot read, you are always over my shoulder.

I might collapse here and hope someone does not see me.
Am I overwhelmed or ******?
Am I lonely or needy?
Truly, I must ask, are things in me or are they part of this library?

What a violent child;
shredding up his skin,
trying to crack his skull just to make it hush,
fighting and screaming for the rush,
but managing to do it all so quietly
and tirelessly.