you say you know pain
i have never known before
what do you know about it?

i tell you what i know
about my own pain
when it is sitting with us

between the spaces of our fingers
between where you stand and i
shift

between my mattress and my bed
my pillow and my head
between the flickers of the light bulb
and the flick of a switch

the spaces you start to think you are better off filling
because at least you'll know what you're filling it with

instead of this enemy you cannot declare persona non grata
to ban it you have to know it
and to know it would be even more pain

like those viruses that trick your immunity
over and over again

you take a shot, you try to help your body recognize it, you get a response
you think you've had its disguise all figured out
until they shape shift again

so you say i know shape shifting pain
so i'm sure you know a pain that cannot hold still
that cannot get its fill
that gnaws and claws
subtly enough that
no one believes you even have pain

you say you know pain
but you don't know a pain that does not qualify, justify, speak for itself
you know a pain with a name you can grab off the shelf
you know pain that society boxes as a grievance, or a loss,
or a disability, an inability, or just don't come to work the next day!

i'll call and i'll get your tone.
but i think you'll find
my pain is the kind of pain that i cannot say over the phone.

you can't speak because all the worries would come spilling out.
overflowing nightmare realities borne of anxiety-fuelled doubt.
and every time you look at me
i get an urge to shout.
but i can't, so i don't, because i don't want all the worries
to come roaring out.

but if i could
oh, i would
tell you with a glance
instead of having my eyes do that familiar yet uncontrollable dance
because i admit to myself (admit to you)
that this is all a little too much

i'd say a little too much more than that, too

and when you're me, and you're like this,
you can't really smile.
because stress pins your lips
into a single file.

(all the worry going: hack - hack - hack)

you submit to it, like we do in the city
when tasked with its defeaning
construction sounds.
opening the blinds, thinking: urbane visionary pretty

and here labor and its fruits align.
  the beauty. the skyline.
that withstanding pain
allowed you to feel

and here you know it's real.
the work on the skyscraper is part of the landscape.

the scraping at my nerves: this is part of my landscape.
the worries that sit inside, that dance outside,
that pinch themselves in between.

the roaring, the dancing, the hacking. telling me
always what i'm lacking.
having me wish i could get packing, abandon myself, leave myself, teach myself, show myself, throw myself,

all this makes up the architecture of my mind.
our gray and white matter contents.
because i chose today to define and anchor this existence
as much in its function as it is by construction.

i choose to be a work in progress
over self destruction

i stand around like freedom in the doorway
lending a sense of urgency to the air
if you take me now, you will find out sooner
the paths you could take, if you dare


but i don't hang around the doorway long enough for you to take me
because to be taken at my challenge would have given me a scare
and i know the next time i look to find you
you and i won't truly be there

it followed me around
like a rumor
until one day, lost its wings
fell into a ditch
and i looked down upon it
eye-to-eye, with its lifeless face
and i could not face it with the same bitterness i had for it
this whole time


i picked up some dirt
and rubbed it on my hands
and let traces of me mixed into the dirt fall onto it
in a way i could not let it go,
at my wit's end, or a dead-end

and even i could see that there was no use pretending we were not intertwined, from life to death

Years ago l swore off writing because it was getting in the way of my story. Some sort of observer's paradox where the perception broke into a dam of longer restrained introspection, and as we all know spelt a recipe for interception. When things were bad, this effect, though consciously not intended, was a welcome source of scarcely-had agency. It was a veil from reality despite its best attempts to portray simultaneous events and tame them all the same. To begin to tell the story was a matter of literary teething, foretelling a survival and endurance of the narrator that carries beyond the events themselves. However sharp those teeth, the experience came with soreness. I longed to write like a teething infant longs to chew, an instinct, a balm to the pain that is so tangible viscerally. And yet I felt stabbed by my own unsheathed pen: first when I touched my own emotional bruises with it, and then when it began to carve marks into the story itself. When writing, it felt as though I had been deployed as a spy: using all of what I know and witnessed, against myself.

i run to you
finding you fallen like a feather
lost from my softest pillow
an object of comfort, when i most needed most to have my arms around something
around anything, to hold me still, to anchor me to this sea of an earth, this oxymoronic existence filled with nothingness and everything all the same.
when my arms sunk into it i felt a connectedness that kept me from floating away

i say this to try and get at what you used to provide me with
it was no easy feat, grounding someone who had their hands perpetually in the sky, always grasping for something beyond and out of reach

but now that i look down, i see you are a fragment of your old self
barely a full sentence, physically but a feather, light enough you could float on air, light enough you could be here and barely be there, light enough that
i can barely see you! barely feel you!
when you are your most bare self you are barely even there.
it makes me wonder how many layers you wore. if being you without the role of comforting me rendered you imperceptible.

i used to love you when you were tangible

but i lost because you are frangible... diffrangible...
diffracted into so many waves

i could find you. i could see you. as one ocean. but you need to have got yourself together. otherwise you are fractions of yourself

because i refuse to love a wave.

it was just like him to slip into her dream
to not quite meet her gaze, and begin to apologize
not because he was sorry, but because he had felt he had suffered enough time
without her forgiveness

he asked her if she was done being angry
and she asked him if he was done being blind

he turned away from her and opened a window she was startled to see. when he was in her dreams it was often tunnel vision.

but today there were details blooming in the peripheries. she felt herself expand from within as the exit naturally showed itself, like a thief of air showing itself out.

he jumped out
and she woke before the thud