strategically submerge my brain in endless hours of mindless entertainment
japanese wrestling matches and youtube documentaries about the cruelest of fates

still when i fall asleep, the one and only thing that i will dream about is you

taylor swift just pushed poetry's modern day public image even farther back into the 'uncool' zone 😭😭😭

do you remember me

probably not
i never became anything

nothing more than suffocating, dissociative daydreams
surrounded by green leaves on lemon trees
i still could not thrive
amidst the accommodating salt air
still fading,
still weak
living on figurative life support all of my teens, now at twenty-three
decaying in one room, with one window looking out to an alley

can i even say i've changed

as romantic as it would be to say yes, and for the worse
i'm still not "me"

i do not even get the luxury of claiming i was once something before i turned into nothing

i remember claiming that i was trying to "be art"
in hopes that being an abstract museum of things you could see, but couldn't touch would somehow save me
but that is no way to feel
no way to be

i am no poem,
i am no painting,
i am no line i am no iris i am no olly

i am nothing

the words that keep coming to mind are "dead life"

i tried to live a life so many times in the ways I could with everything against me. dissociating and clinging to anything all of my teen years and up until recently. yes it wasn't real or material but there was life there. life that i couldn't reach but life nonetheless that i wanted so bad and kept trying to preserve. but i can't beat the dead horse anymore. the dead horse that is my ideal body, my hope for a comfortable life, my dreams. i havent looked in the mirror and meant it in over half a year. ive done it so many times. thinking that one day it would be how i want it to be. and id dream about it, and make plans that i knew i couldn't see through.

"if you just do stuff and nothing happens, whats it all mean? whats the point?"

i still live a life as everybody else does, but the one life ive wanted more than anything is a dead life

"don't look back, you'll turn to stone"
the words i heard driving past my old home
melancholic breeze sending sweet messages to my tachycardia ridden body, a bird that passes through in peace but drops dead like a fly within my smoldering territory
remembering the years I spent inside that home, time that in my fragile state today i'd mistakenly describe as a respite from my current place
but as I sink into my seat, the sobering reality that I am the same motionless vessel that I was then begins to set in
the labyrinth I could not escape still pervades my every waking moment
the days I coped with promises to myself, from a wealth of unearned confidence that has long since run dry
the only difference between them and me being the destiny I coaxed myself into believing at seventeen

i am a worthless pillar of salt

cursed from the moment a devil pointed his finger at something behind me

i wish death was as sweet as when it's romanticized
i wish you could **** me
in a way that feels like i am sleeping
i'd curl up in the comfort of your poison ivy arms
until i am so weak
and i could finally go easily
but my life is filled with bloodshot, hungry, swollen eyes
that stare right into me
and contemplate my very breathing
though i just don't care to see them
and they mean nothing to me
those same eyes that did condemn me to a life devoid of sleep
now depend on the conditions they all  imposed onto me
to hold steady and not subject them
to the trauma of my absence
it's the only thing hindering me from succumbing to this fractured spine that i exist with
even quicker than i will eventually