say it like a prayer you said. hold it in your breath you said hold it like this is the only thing left to hang onto. like this is the last hope for you in life and I would never wish that onto you you said but I find myself often at this point. and I've been saved by that light I've been saved by a prayer after exhausting all the other things I begged from every one and every other. on knees and palms gathering all the things I've wished for in words in the shape of a prayer. so pray so I do, praying apologetically and it feels like repentance. but fight fire with fire. (turns out there's quite a few.) I'm gonna have to apologize and the first apology to is you. so I did, so I do. (and I'm mad with myself too) so I hold my breath in for a long time, hold it in till I turn myself all the angry shades of blue. i'm turning into him and i'm turning into you. I’ve been doing this to me and I’ve been doing this to you.  I've been depriving myself this whole time, I only have apologies here and they're bad excuses for air but who cares when I'm still gasping. I'm tight ****** and I'm loose willed. all purpose without meaning and meaning without purpose. what do you make of yourself, what do you yourself make. I'll do all the asking you say, you do all the praying, we need to pretend they're not one and the same. no absolute answers and no absolution. you want absolution and I'm sorry but we don't have anyone with us anymore. the hell is gonna give that to you? who the hell is going to hand you the knife you stabbed them with back? and say all's forgiven? I want you to know the feeling on the top of your head in the weight of your tread in the back of your throat I want you to promise me you're going to forget redemption and forget your pride and say your prayers and come back to us inside.

And you think this is ironic, don't you? Or you think it's funny, or that it makes sense. And it does in a way, I'm trying to agree with you enough to say. It does make sense, but in a way that disappoints me, because to have it make sense would mean certain conditions were fulfilled. And thinking of fulfillment gets me thinking of filling and I'm filled and I'm empty all at once. And it's because I've got all these hopes and all these promises, all these leads to nowhere– and I know deep down how good the somewhere I'm heading to without you is, I know, but I really hoped there was some way to make this journey we had seem like a trip I'd want to look back on, seem like a trip I'd want to keep an album of photos from, like an album I'd hide all the concert tickets and gas station receipts from and all the hugs all the stupid hugs I got from you, I'd still feel the warmth from. But it's not like that, I guess I spent my time in nowhere, and I guess that's where I'll have to admit I stayed. And I'm somewhere else now, somewhere good, and it isn't funny, and it isn't ironic. Ironic is talking to someone who is no one to me now. Ironic is in that space that used to be filled with something else and now it's nothing else but space, space, space. I want space from the space. I want a belief to hold me in my place. You can't give me what I need, but I've been thanking God anyways for what I have, and I'm getting by just fine.

hold you like a wake
hold you like a funeral
rolling in your sleep, mourning on your part
good night tonight, kiss you good
bad night as well

wake up, bad knight
back to screaming, wrong or right
break a switch, unfix
get your fix, learn your tricks
i wish magic could fix us too

instead i crack open a ringing nightmare
dragging me in ear and hair


hold me like a martyr hold me everywhere
fold me like i'm dying for you
   don't you see i'm dying with you?

but good times never last

run my mouth, break my cast
run my secrets, like i ask
bathwater never tasted or felt so blue
i'm going crazy! because of you!

i hate to love! i hate you too!
hold you, feel you, learn you, heavy
i'm going heavy
drowning in rain, drowning
in lightness

darkness without option for brightness
hug me till i'm good and dead
till i forget what's now in my head

and i wish you would come for me! like i come for you!
like i do for you! like i am to you! but i'm nothing to you!
and you're nothing to me! and you're dead to me! and i'm dead to me!

and no one is ever sorry! everyone is always swearing to be clean
you're not clean! there's blood on me, there's blood on you
past is past but future's gone too
and i'm sorry about this although not specifically about you
i've gone into myself
as refuge now

good morning from the north coast
where i ran a hurricane through the wash
and hung it up to dry
before i chased a fever down a battered thermostat
to sneak a swap between its truth to my lie

welcome to the north coast
where all the older all the golder
even if it was once nightmare black
we here do have a habit of missing what we lack

where i stretched to touch the morning, to find it so closely out of reach
and did the laundry once more
drowned the daytime dark with bleach

with another voice, seasoned, worn, hurricane-ripped but not tornado-torn
fidget still in my fingers, sore still in my head, still
beginning upon a realization, only further away

drift, so it drifts, the push is a blessing
till sore turns to burn and fidget becomes seizure shake
till all good things worn out with season-anticipated break

and no break is a good break, no efficiency is deficiency, deficiency is lack
lack is no good and no good is evil

and evil is darkness and darkness was meant to be bleached
if all good-really-but-bad-really things could be survived
as lessons but to teach

and how many more? till my voice loses hold again?
till all hope comes loose? cog in the machine and the machine hates itself too?

till chapter begins with over till book reads end

till i found myself another war to tend. till the summer thins and the fall rains begin to pour

once more, it's flooding out my door

and door keeps evil but not from coming in
keeps my own mercilessness trapped deep within

and within leaves room for thought but fall leaves fall

and drown in my admission, or don't bother trying to make it out at all

and delusion is my saviour and delusion is her crown

till all my good promises became people to let down

and i love you my baby, i love you with good will
and good intention. and all the seams i tried to sew

but there was so much more you did not know

incoherence, cold spoons, feeding myself off pieces of myself lodged acutely on the tip of my brain's tenderest sense

i don't have time to cope, i tell everyone
but i do make time on my own to mourn
to cry for the lost memory i used to play again and again
with obsession, with burning resolve
till every nook felt rummaged and every crack felt filled

i call it futile
because today i only remember playing it over and over again
and yet not a clue what "it" is

I thought all this time that understanding was currency and it would
buy me reciprocity, it would buy me good faith
so i gave and gave till i deflated like a balloon
going from full and heavy to nightmarishly empty so quick and so soon
you know me well, so treat me well!
but you don't, you don't. my hell and your hell spell a hell of a hell. you know it and you wish you didn't
so it is now a bigger injustice, i can't lay blame on ignorance, you know it now
a truth interchangeable with yours! i'm hurting! i'm hurting!

you're a part of the fire now!
that can only mean i am a part of yours.

so you got it all along and it didn't save me.

it's been a while since I had it in me to stop talking to someone like this
probably things stopped making sense, and that's what makes sense now
I know it seems abrupt but I'm finding other things more disjointed than that
Like there's a space between what I expect to find when I turn to look at it
and what I actually find staring at me back
and I'm uncomfortable, I'm really really uneasy, but it feels easy to
call it home and be done with it. But people remind me
how good it is to forget. Funny how they think, that forgetting is escaping
when history repeats itself and I'm going to
be shocked again and I don't want to do that anymore.