i wonder if my suicide attempt did in fact **** me
and this is hell.
with each one, it seems to get worse.

time always moves backwards and then suddenly it’s forward.
i live in my memories. flashbacks. nightmares.
nightmares if i sleep at all.
and when i don’t, the friends behind my ear
keep me company.
the roommates in my head drown me
and blur my vision.
i feel red in my eyes when i get this way.
the stars fall like the burning fireballs they are
and the screams are unbearable
and the cries are aching
and my heart is being pulled out of my chest
like flowers off its root.
when i’m this way, i’d rather die.

parties isolate me.
loneliness swallows me in screaming and begging.
how did i get this way?
i don’t want it.
take it from me.
maybe then i’ll be able to live happy.

I stick my fingers in my throat
and throw up a basket of swallowed suns;
under it, my tongue is parched and pinned in place
like a dried house moth on an entomologist’s hand
that nurses it back to life

and demands devotion in return,
a poem in return.

But I have purged the feeling being out of me
like a cold, cold man now averse to the ways of his younger lover
who is alive for all of it — the lust and the starving kisses
and the quiet deaths in the morning only to haunt at night.

I leave letters for my bitten nails without meaning a single word,
and go to lie with the superficiality, the hypocrisy nesting under my tongue.

I have started writing poems again — see where they take me this time
and find myself here, once more
where a fool unpacks her baggage and out I come rolling
like a dead body with a foaming mouth, a brown moth burning under the sun,
a leech that scurries under salt and needles,
slowly eroding like sanity.

She thinks, therefore, she is, they say,
but at what cost? She looks on and pens this poem
with a tiny smile on her lips.

My father hid himself
within the smoke
underneath my ribcage

Sometimes he rattles his fingers
underneath my bones
and squirms his hands
around my ticker

He taught the monster under my bed
to crawl under my skin
and stick his filthy fingers
in the cracks of my brain
and break it in half

His name echoes the canals of my ears
and his shadow haunts every step
I wish I could’ve made

Encased, as an oil painting,
behind a plane of glass.
Years of exposure dulling the canvas,
no funding to restore the brightness
of the subject's lifeless eyes.
They lay dormant, cloudy,
From a lifetime of accumulative debris.
Transferred between people, buildings, countries;
Memories on display for brief intervals,
Then packaged and returned to storage,
As if they were never your own.
People shift, distorted, beyond the coffin of glass.
Their movements hazy,
The shutter speed slow.
Colours muted,
Sounds muffled,
Melting into each other.
An abstract watercolour, waxing and waning.
Low resolution projections on a dimly lit screen -
A theatre seating but one.

A glass has come between me and reality.
This glass encapsulates my being.
The longer I remain in the glass,
the hazier my view becomes.
How I long to shatter it.

The glass has held me captive for quite some time,
and I realize I have come to know the glass like no other.
The glass has protected me from the strange outer world.

I have come to long for the glass which holds me.
But when I reach for the glass,
all I feel is bleak
and yet still my hand is left with nothing.

I cannot grasp the glass
because I cannot see the glass itself,
only what it is not.