hello barbie
r u there?
It's been 4 years and 57 girls
But i dreamt of you two nights in a row
And this is why i tweak most nights
If i can't dream it's easier to believe that i'm doing just fine
Do people have somewhere to go when they're alone?
I feel like all i can do is roam and roam and roam
I'm privy to the big secret
That nothing really matters
And we ascribe as much importance to where we deem it most fitting
And i cannot for the life of me figure out after everything
Why it still stings

I wonder if you know how it's like to be irrevocably aching. I wonder if you understand when I stumble out a club at 4 on a Saturday, my hands filled with her and my head filled with you. I wonder if you can tell that I am spineless even when I am inebriated, that sobriety only brings back a lump in the throat that came when you left like a sick, sick, sick replacement. I wonder all these things, and sometimes I don't have to wonder, because I know you don't, not a little bit, not at all.

how did  a few nights with you
turn into months of restless sleep?
you haunt my fever dreams,
in them your fingers reach into my mouth
to pull me by the teeth

how are you telling me
that your existence is weightless?
i could drag you down, the way
my own being has dragged me down for as long as i’ve misunderstood its purpose

I’ve seen myself in the mirror.
it’s one thing to acknowledge your existence,
and another to question your place in the universe.

I sleep with the television turned on.
While I scream, it drones.
I don’t think I’ve watched a minute of it in the last three years though, I’m glued to my phone.
We’re glued to our phones.

I don’t yell much anymore.
Lack of living has beat the life out of me.
I’d worry about what any of this means, but being chemically inbalanced means I’m prospectively challenged.
So I don’t worry about it.

Maybe tomorrow will be different.

"I'm not afraid to die," I said
If I was sure money wouldn't be wasted on a funeral
I'd **** myself anyway

Inconsequential, any of us
Why does it even matter, when all we are is dust?
"You inject meaning, and that's how you live how you do"
I reject that completely, what I've done is just not done.

some nights
i am there, flying over words, my brain voiding out the blank worlds it skipped in its impatient race to catch another glimpse of what i saw that night, you knee deep in the water with your eyes lost beyond the horizon when you said this should be enough but it never would be

other nights i am here, crawling over words, trying to get to there.

i tried to shoot for the moon
But gravity reared its head
my dreams just couldn't escape orbit
now my dreams are dead

of course i dreamt about then
insidious, hazy but now all i smell is
vanilla and it reminds me of a heart
twinge the way it envelops my
sense of self. the hill i would die on is
the hill i ran from, the spiral
downward familiar i
wish you would see me burn

the tight ball of nerves sitting in my gut
has not left
only you, everything else is white noise

2 am and I can't sleep
With you racing through my mind
How could I?
Leaving tracks and bitterness on my insides
The scent of flowers and putrid feelings linger on
Permeating the air around my soul
You left your imprints, you ******
They burned through and left a hole
I can't shake you out
I breathed you in too deeply
Poisoned my very being
Now I feel so ******* lonely

i sleep.
and dream of lives i i would have given myself over to if they were more than dreams.

but i wake up to less, and less might be more but the more i sleep

the less i dream

it could be said that i dwell in the past more than is healthy - it’s just that there are just certain nows that I live in infinitely, its shelf life in the murky recesses of my mind extended involuntarily whenever i slip into the haze between lucidity and oblivion.

the nows aren’t good or bad - but that’s par for the course, i haven’t seen anything but greys in the last decade

i am selfish, hungry
yearning for what i could never need
that my ego would smother any want in the crib
because i know what i become when
stripped bare, that i lose any sense of self and become an unfaithful anagram of all the things you
love and deplore

you asked once why everything
i write sounds like regret - and i
remember lying through my teeth, wanting so ******* hard to sound like as if i’ve never given a **** in my life and wasn’t about to start.

i mean, it worked with everyone else, didn’t it?

i was fuming. how dare you? deconstruct
me like that, and for that i mustered all of my boyish pride - and pretended I never knew you.

and that is why everything i
write sounds like regret.

most normal nights it's about something stupid or other, like my mother's tendency to cry when I visit her

like my inability to find something I could stick with for all of adulthood other than writing terrible anecdotes on existentialism

like the look of abject disappointment on my father's face when he found out I was getting dropped from school again

like the whole of 2015, where I spent all year convalescing behind a bar counter, convinced I could save peanuts for a degree

like when I watch motes of dust wrestle in dim light and tell myself it's just a phase


it's just a phase

do you know this dream? tied
to a fence, barking. the mailman comes, afraid -
he confuses your overeager friendliness with ill feeling. do you
know this dream? the sun never goes away - your cratered imperfection never shows his face. do
you know this dream? on her sleeve worn, you wear away.
the wind never blows you straight - do you know
this dream?

I felt like a thief, undeserving of the air around me
Every breath stolen from the lungs of someone less unworthy
Even then I couldn't stop breaking hearts
Despoiling souls, taking them apart
It filled me with completion
Causing another's destruction
Reducing them to shattered nerves,
Trembling hands and ****** curves
It made me feel significant, that I existed
Just only with the toll of self-hate

I ***** stanzas -
I spew literary clutter
My poetry is aimless
The words all muddled

I write unsharpened
The point pressed pointless
A fire smoldering with no tinder
The universe questions its existence

I remember when we sat on a park bench at night, and your head lay nestled in the hollow of my shoulder.
My arm circled around your waist, reaching to meet its twin’s wrist.
I looked at you, and you blushed, and told me that staring was rude.
I spelled ‘M-I-N-E’ in the space between your collarbones and your brow with kisses, and breathed words I never dared to speak.
You were flowers in May, the sea spray in July, and the cold wind of November.
I was obsessed, and I knew I would never be good enough.
Two days later, we broke up.
Every kiss since then has left me lonelier.