Mania. Everything was good when you were with me.

I felt normal. The chains bolted to my eyelids where magically gone, like the money in your bank account after a heavy, drunken, stupor & forthright gambling spree.

The spear in my side that your twin brother, depression, threw inside me was no longer twisting up my insides. Thank you.

This feels like a goodbye letter but I'm actually trying to hold on to you. You give me life. Your twin takes it away and he rash-burns my face in it.

I was accomplishing all the things; skipping from one stone to the next without feat. "Flutter your wings and dance," is your motto.

But like all good things, you drive me away, knowing that I'll see you again.

Try as I might, I remain faithful to you, but you commit adultery every week.

Sometimes you demand my time, even when I'm low. I cry for hours with your natural dichotomy, not because I can't decide--I can--but because you and your twin rip me apart in twain, changing my reality as sure as the rain falls in the Amazon.

The demons call out to me, whispering evil into my mind. I believe every evil thing when I am not armed with your brilliance. I lose that perspective, every time, and sometimes immediately.

Your twin brother and cousin visit me early in the morning right before bed time. If my doubts and fears are real, then my mind's eye is experiencing a real reality, and thus I am as I feel, like a plastic bag tumbling in the wind.

Yet, everyone reminds me that I am but a joke and a comic, one which not even you can trust.

The biggest asset I lose when you choose to cheat on me is your energy--that precious flow that bears my creative passion.

But now I am barren, an unfit conduit that is incapable of maintaining that flow. The demon upon me powerfully weaves its tapestry of sludge that encases my mind.

My mind, it's the only thing I have left. And yet, I can never trust it.

You've lied to me before and you'll lie to me in the future.

But for now, I'll have to make do with your half-truths.

Until next time.

it is always nights like this, where everything is so quiet you can hear beneath the absolute threshold, when i begin to wonder if i am going mad. technically, if one were truly losing their mind, they wouldn’t take much notice to the clarification that their reality is nothing but intricate lies spun by their brain.

pushing onwards within the dark, i can feel it. a whisper of a dance in memory slices gracefully across my cheek. the hungry caress of a lost lover. it is a random number between three and four, counting the days of sleepless solitude; as my lover is playing tricks on me.

it is just before dawn. the house breathes and groans like a wretched soul trapped in a bottomless pit long before midnight. in the gray morning light, delicate wrists stained with ink serve as maps through a desolate labyrinth. “lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”

from the corner of my eye i see shadows of uncharted men that feed upon the protective covering, encasing us; separating our world from theirs. the barrier is a shield at best, yet doorway at worst.

try to detach your eyes from their persistent, wandering gaze; and you might just catch a glimpse of a shadow gliding out of sight.

don’t second guess yourself sweetheart, you know exactly what you saw.

shadowy figures slightly out of reach, but still quite visible – gliding silently amidst, whispering quietly to those surrounding. looking directly at the figures, a gauzy lace veil delicately masks and covers each shadow.

unseen claws shred the thin barrier before it is tattered and torn. one by one, little by little, each figure sharpens into perfect visual acuity, wholly in sigh(t). as you slowly inch back, eyes unblinking with disbelief, their voices are no longer whispers.

the gaping pits of opened mouths drown you in hollow prattles, screeching rasps; the cruel high pitched icy sneers of laughter.

petrified with terror and shock at the shadow’s newfound ability to speak, you acutely notice that the house is creaking and wheezing. you can hear footsteps on the opposite side of the house, and with your eyes averted, they are gone.

with this, you must take into consideration that i have spent far too long with eyes wide shut, drowning in utter fear fueled by morbid curiosity for this world: things seen and heard. each is a cancerous tumor mutilating my mind beyond repair.

to me, the shadow figures’ tattered veil appears to be a doorway, a portal to another universe. this sheer possibility spawns the magnitude of infinite and parallel universes.
much like the shifting hallways concealed in an e(in)ternal labyrinth.

amidst this never ending maze, man is forced to wander blindly from birth to death; where he then circles back around to his exact place of previous conception, only to be born anew. condemned to blindly roam and repeat his unbroken cycle for all eternity.

in this labyrinth we are all gods, we are all monsters. each creation story is universal, yet individual to each new life.

the sinner and the saint are both born into divinity.

You fool
You idiot
You’ve fought off lust for so long
Only for it to end like this
You slipped up
Fell right into her wanting arms
In your mind
A thousand thoughts
How can I get myself out of this?
But you’ve been here before
Back for the third time
Ands she’s asking for it
You idiot no go home
But lust had you so so blind
And when y’all kissed
Even though you felt like you were kissing a dead fish
Regret
Second thought
Out of sight out of mind
Now you’re on top
She’s asking your repeatedly
Stick it in
But your hearts pumping
Trying to stay focus
But the act your partaking in
You know is one of the seven deadly sins
But the word no it’s like an oiled up pole
You can’t keep it in your grip
There’s just no way you can win
Ok ***** it
I give up
I give in
Flesh against flesh
Skin against skin
Lips against lips
Her breast in your hand
Now she’s on top
But pains she’s in
Ok let’s try this one more time
You’ve just had “***”
With one of your closest friends
No their more like “family” members
Well they’re not going to consider you family anymore
Once they found out you’ve slept with their kin
Now disappointment is a fatal scent
Lingering on your breath

A poem a day
Keeps the pain away
It keeps these eyes
Drier then a desert sky
A poem a day
Keeps me from dying completely inside
It’s my defibrillator
And keeps my pulse alive
A poem a day
Corrals my faith and keeps it intact
A poem a day
Keeps the demons at bay

Train 85 leaves the station and bursts into the blinding sunlight with a surreal suddenness. Below, to the left of the tracks, a field of wheat sways as though still under a summer sun. Golden-brown and lively in spite of the snow resting at its roots. The blinding sun hangs high, glimmering on the water. It gives me a headache. I try to ignore it.

Ahead of me, the laughter of two young people fills the car. I wonder if they are strangers, engaged in conversation just minutes after meeting. I wonder if they have the same destination, if they are each equally happy to be heading towards it.

To my right, across the aisle, a woman no older than fifty talks loudly on the phone about her father’s tumor and the biopsy that will soon determine if it is cancer. She sounds optimistic, and I am happy for her. I tread lightly on the thought that maybe her loud optimism is a front. I want to be happy for her. But in an hour I will get off this train, and if her father dies, I will never know.

The woman sitting next to me returns from the café car with a Dunkin' Donuts coffee and takes out her laptop. I turn down my brightness so that she can’t see that I am writing about her. Even though I write nothing bad, it feels like some sick invasion of privacy.

My fingers feel heavy. This train feels heavy.

I want to be outside, before the sun sets, while the golden-brown wheat is still bathed in light. The sun is going to set without me. I try to be okay with that.

The last time I ever wrote on an Amtrak — the last time I can remember —, it was a song about loneliness and self-destruction. It was more than two years ago. I want to be able to say that I have changed more than I actually have. But even as the world rushes past me, snow and wheat and house and sun, I still feel impossibly lonely. The heaviness from my fingers is in all of me now. I can’t shake it.

The young people ahead of me, the woman across the aisle, and the woman next to me all begin talking at once now, and I feel hot. Their words bounce back and forth off the walls, and I need to get off of this train. Receiving these airborne snippets of other lives feels wrong, feels overwhelming.

Anyone who reads this piece will think I’m insane.

The woman next to me stops speaking. The young people ahead of me quiet down. The woman across the aisle is engaged in some other conversation that I can’t exactly make out. It’s quieter. I might still break the windows of this train if I could, but it is quieter. My fingers feel a little less heavy. It is quieter. At least the insanity is in words now.