Woke, what does it mean?
You call everything woke with which you disagree
Having blue hair or boys over for tea
Though you turn your head away from real atrocities
Small bodies in cots, bellies distended from rot
Young black men in the streets out there getting shot
Women carrying babies with no hope of life
Yet you call this "woke" and claim your own strife
If your eyes were to open and you were to see
Maybe you'd be awoken, woke just like me.

Lines and lines and lines
upon skin, upon life, upon reality
lines I can see with my eyes
overlapping everything.
The world becomes a spiral notebook
written with dialogue
Yells, and screams, and whispers
crowds the page
Dreams becomes colors to splash
and stain
to overpower, and disappear completely
Black and white
becomes the paint on my palate
and chisels and saws as my brushes
To chip and chip away at the walls
that keep me locked
up
This cage is more lines
preventing my words from
ripping the page
that has become my world
fragile, stiff, uncomfortable
Something to hold me as I stay still
My eyes become just a line,
clenched into the dark
to not be able to see the world
that has begun to fall apart
My mouth will become a line too,
just another in a world of circles
To stay closed for words I know
will destroy what I have carefully built
around me
Lines and lines and lines
to distract me from the curved ones in
everyone else's eyes
lines and lines and lines
to carry me home when my knees give out from below me
So many lines
I cannot see
for lines over lines over lines
scars over top of each other
it stings
but I know I won't fall apart

Words evade me, often on this day, if I become more silent
Then would I be able to avoid my place?
Just one card bought me just half a day of smiles that even I couldn't keep off my face
And I wish I had said something if I had known what to say
Although you don't know, there are many reasons why
And even then, I'll ignore the day and pray for the gift of rain from the sky

Go, my weary soul, go and rest
Go, my saddened thoughts, go to bed
Close your eyes for a minute or two
Calm your heart that drowns in blue
Go, my lost friend, and look upon the crying skies
Go, my lost god, and find the missing stars by night
Walk one more step along the journey with the weight you have carried
Set your eyes for the treasure, all the memories you have buried
So go, my lovely dear, go and rest
Go, one last time, before goodbye and make do of the best

Voices keep me company, sometimes one, sometimes a crowd
O’er the mountains of withering roses
Comes black wine that slips down the wrists
Of which the shackles bind
They say to heal, they say to punish
But I just wish for one day of quiet

I know that there was a line that I sewn upon my skin
Thread made of emotions that I couldn’t hold on to
They slipped and slid and came out of my grasp
And if I tried to lock them away, they’d easily undo the clasp
I sit at a wheel, my finger at a thorn,
Spinning roses, and flowers, and threads for toys
If I can create something, something to be kept,
Would I someday find these things again and learn to accept?
Or would the thread someday fade and unwind behind the scenes
Undoing in the corners, ripping the seams
Things like these, I know, weren’t meant to last forever
They were meant to be loved, cared for, watched, and maintained.
But if I cannot move myself from this bed,
And catch the hands of the monster speaking in my head
Would I be able to learn how to thread the eye of the needle
So I could learn to love again?

broken sleep,
discontinued dreams,
tossing and turning
at four in the morning.

i barely sleep anymore.

its too hot under these covers,
im too cold now,
i need to be held,
im gonna die in my sleep.

i cant turn my brain off.

i get broken sleep,
i get those discontinued
unfinished --
extremely real feeling dreams,
i toss and turn all night long
still uncomfortable after each turn.

i cant stop
and take a break.

Ecstatic in the sea breeze,
a magnanimous moment of
interloper pride ******* the day.
Uncoil—my heart, my chin,
my unglamorous abstinence
enforced by fear.
This is no lapse, but fury
and fortitude forging me
in the crucible of love.
Yet again I am up against it—
the stage of floating eyes and
overcooked feelings pawing
at my attention like
squids in a pool.
Ink and jelly in a room temperature soup
swirling and sloshing under
the authority of a rented room.
By gods, this time I’ll make it work—
plant leaves and blunderbusses
leaning against teal paint,
the sun really is on a fishhook.
Stand apart from me then and
judge the waters for what they are—
a storm too small to surface
in a sky too big to swallow.
I’m sweating in it
and the alarm clock is going off.
bleet
   bleet
      bleet
Too deep to turn back.
Too tired to go on.
This is where the end begins,
in the middle of it
with no ground at all.