"today my professor told me every cell in our entire body is destroyed and replaced every seven years.
how comforting it is to know one day i will have a body you will have never touched."

"We have built cathedrals out of spite and splintered bone, of course they aren't pretty, nothing holy ever is-"

boy is jumping off church roofs in desperate attempts to feel whole again, boy is drinking ***** and holy water in class to purify his soul that he says is a desert wasteland. he is a river, deep and twisting, wild and dark but dark like a forest not a starless sky. he is tired, down to his blood cells.

boy is "try harder next time" boy is "smart kid but doesn't apply himself" boy is "needs to contribute more to discussion" boy is trying, he is cough syrup and caffeine, a system that is rusting and breaking.

What did I expect?
To leave a haemorrhage
of violets wherever I walked?
No. A lost son is called prodigal.
A lost daughter is just called lost.

She should've stood out in a crowd
She should've made her mother proud
She should've fallen on her stance
She should've had another chance

She should have been a son
She should have been a son
She should have been a son
She should have been a son

'You're a heap of flesh and guts and blood in a wax museum. The only thing real. Sickeningly real. Crimson and warm where the others are pale and cold. Revoltingly red,
nauseatingly alive. You're a child in a graveyard.

when i die i want my corpse to be unrecognizable. a something-or-other dead on the side of the road, half-eaten, half-crushed, all-forgotten

i am no hector of troy.
the gods of Olympus won't keep my corpse clean until my father comes pleading.
my gods are the earthworms writhing beneath me and gift-giver Gaia, who strips my bones of their flesh and whispers softly as she feeds me to her children "lie still, lie still, lie still"