im-always-write

[im-always-write]

it's a good fake, it's a good cope, and it's a nice idea

but of infinite layered universes, i don't want to be in this one

and i love you, oh, i love you, every life i'd search for you

but the fact remains that loving you, won't make me love me also

don't want to waste another year, another life without you

but my mind is heavy, my body aches, and im tired of fighting, losing

i want to live with my mistakes, i want to love my body, and

i want to know my future and i want to want to chase it

but i can't see past my black sun, i can't see the horizon, and

I'm scared of waking up today, tomorrow, i just want to rest now

please, im begging any god, why would you do this to me, why

you give to me the perfect partner, but not the tools to love me

damn your justice, damn your virtue, damn your kindness and your mercy

i just want one thing, now, forever

i just want to love me

[im-always-write]

i don't know how to.

forget you, or even

process you, because i dont

remember you clearly.

you brought me to make your ex jealous

you sat me on your lap like a trophy

you plied me with alcohol because you knew it made me subdued and submissive

and you probably liked that in all your victims,

and i want to know--did someone hurt you for you to want control that way

for you to

try and reclaim your body that way, reclaim your virtue by taking what i didn't have anyway

reaching for my innocence and instead orying from my ribcage my trust

you smoothed me into an easy target because you knew that i thought you were honest,

because i was comfortable with you in a way i wasn't with him,

even when he hurt more, between my legs.

your friend, now my friend--and its a twisted victory, to know that they'd see in you what you took from me and choose my side

your friend asked me if i was ok

when i tried to escape the noise and lights, in the dark refuge of the bathroom upstairs

someone's home i didn't know, because i was only to show off

i said yes, because i was drunk,

and because i was 18 and didn't know,

and it should've been no to any responsible adult

(i think, i think your friend knew it was no)

but you groomed me into dependency

and when i could not walk home on my own you brought me to yours and

i only have. snapshot moments

but i hope you know they do not paint you favorably

and when you left me, passed out on someone's lawn, to wake in the morning

i hope you know i remember my walk home

and i hope that you know

that i know what you did

[im-always-write]

what is it like to

to not kick,

to not cry,

to not scream,

or wake up in the night to an imagined shadow on your hips

my brain won't grant me the reprieve of wakefulness,

or even the inconveniences to jerk others from sleep and so

at night i submerge,

lead-footed

into a pool of hands that only hurt me

into a pool of voices that only lie to me

into a pool of nightmares that only i

can see

[im-always-write]

i think i came to a conclusion today,

something, i think, i already knew

or had at least accepted as a given

but only as a given in the future i wanted desperately to have, but was never sure i'd get

to have it in my arms now, to have time to cradle it in my chest--a voice still screams beseechingly: dont get attached, don't learn to love this,

for when they leave you, like all do, it will be one more nail you'll drive into your ribs like coffin

your chest, where you hold all your dead and dying things, the things that wail and cry like inconsolable infants

only aware of irreconcilable pain, and of the helpless, desperate need for someone to heal them.

these are the aches i know

the aches i had perhaps foolishly resigned myself to, before i ever got a glimpse skyward

and even then, descending back into perdition, allowed myself to play out to a deliriously hopeful extent.

but dreaming, never touching

a fantasy, charming and welcoming and twinging in my skin with want, but. not the logical progression. not the progression i believed myself capable of, or thought i deserved.

but i can write a million eddas about the simple realizations i know:

domestic,

i take my showers at night and you in the morning,

you sat in on toilet lid to let the steam help your lungs

everything in me, every old pig-shriveled instinct made me want to hide behind the tile-glass wall between us, to lick again at old wounds with mercifully removed eyes, because i no longer look in my reflection--for beauty, for hope, for answers.

my entire body, as a concept, exists nowhere but in my mind.

but then--shower spray-cornered

and i said yes and i meant yes, because this something i have to work out in myself--but then

you once again, like always, like i never feel worthy of, you're gentle

when i meet your eyes you hold me there, where others have let themselves stray in favor of more interesting territory

and though its all horribly familiar terrain, grotesque to my own eyes

something about your maps is new,

makes me want to your hand tighter, pull you closer. journey with me

the towels in our house arent as big as i'd prefer to hide, and i let myself think several hateful things before i catch your eyes on me and its just

every time, you look at me with love in your eyes,

every time i see you soften with understanding,

every time you brighten with intelligence and understanding,

and every time you breathe in my space and count me worthy to bathe in your presence, in your gaze

i feel a little less like the horrible little slug i think i think i am,

and a little more like the flower you look at me as.

[im-always-write]

a sad gardener grows a sad garden,

that's what i have been told

don't let the seasons age your heart

don't let your plants grow cold

but i am what i am and so,

as anyone can see

my garden suffers, buckles, frail,

and in the center, me

oh what i have let winter kill,

and what has overgrown

it feel like flowers now so still

just yesterday were sown

i let the frost and stormy bellows

turn my soul to led

and now as ice and storm-clouds mellow

my garden feels so dead

but i will pull up what i must

and prune back to the root

i will give it one more year

and hope, this time, for fruit

for seasons come and seasons go

and i know where I've been

just as surely as i know

that spring brings life again

[im-always-write]

vibrancy is a psychotic's nightmare

and i was such a bright child,

such a gifted child,

semi-grounded in the present

and a decade passed still isn't enough to clearly see my future

i was blinded by the bleached light of summer, washed out,

laying comatose and amassing dirt in my chest while the sky burned red with every october

please come home, please come home, please always come home

and the refuge of dark, smoked-out winter clouds will not cost me my delusions so

was it worth it?

when every sound was for me and only me, i could be of body but not mind

and when my bloodied feet gave way to hallway wheels and tags and body bags i want to know

was it worth it?

a poet always dies young but i was stained from the beginning and got the benefit of never knowing how to live another,

drifting in and out of others, my own head was the only sounding board and god knows i spent enough time to drive those echoes into the floor

i only want to make sense because ever since i have felt like a faded painting

visible from an angled distance, and i promise the closer you get the stranger i become

i forgot everyone's name, and when even my eyes would not show me mercy to dry my tears, i had hands to write,

i had rhymes to wrong

off the backs of doctor's desks in chicken-scratch description, medication says that my answers are numbered but the word count isn't high, i dont

need anyone to take me at my words and wonder why,

it was so that after i had stripped my bones to nothing,

after i had whittled my skin,

that after ihad ripped the meat from my heart and cursed my eyes

that maybe I'd find meaning in this blood

maybe i could draw from the well within me to push ink like daisy chains into the paper,

shackled and bidden by the drive to make it mean something, to grind my teeth into the dirt until my screams made sparks enough to move me,

until i could look back at soil spill pens and say yes,

it was worth it.

to have the claw marks of my demons drag me back from familiar edges,

to look down the razor thin lines of my veins and memorize their color under blue sky,

for someone else stuck slogging through the tar in their own minds to see my knee-skinned gravel road beside theirs,

it has to be

worth it

it has to mean something

lithium doesn't make long life anything but a Lie,

and if im already quarter-lifed, half-lifed

then i only have so long to turn my tears into potable water

and when i waste away will i have wasted my days

or can i say that it meant something,

it was a dim, struggling flame but even lights in darkness still cast shadow,

and there is nothing in the depths of the earth where no sun ever shines until we strike matches

I've been fighting so long my legs ache,

but existence is not a battle i am willing to lose laying down,

and if its all but stubbornness that keeps me upright,

it will be worth it.

i hope, it will be worth it.

[im-always-write]

none of my words are coming out

the way i want them to,

and i want to gnash my teeth,

chew my thoughts into submission on sharp enamel against static orange but

my jaw doesnt work right

a creaking, overwrought factory

shuddering under the weight of its wearhouse

and how weathered are my wooden bones

i splinter easily, greenstick fracture cage around my heart

and most days it feels like i can't breathe without it hurting

when you live on a timeline, one

meaningless day strung after another

with a hopeless kind of stubbornness

just 17 days.

please tell me you have an answer

because i can't keep living like this, i cant keep looking out on the horizon and expecting smoke where there are clouds,

i can't normalize a bloodied sky

and the stifling heat that pinned me to the floor this summer

i cant live in shoes haunted with the dead weight of a dream i drag around as an after-thought

it is loud, in the space where my spine just keeps bending,

maddeningly,

supple like a spring branch but all i want is to snap

november has never shown me kindness,

and her darkened days and smothered life only whip my stone heart colder

i wish i could find space for you

i wish i could wedge you inside my chest,

between my heart and lungs and all the soft things that hurt

because the static in my head wont let me sleep and the orange behind my eyes makes me cry for the person i dont get to be

please, im so tired

i wish that i could cut off that head beast from the strings of my stomach,

but it is a puppeteer who knows just one act and will strangle himself before he gives up his dolls

i string together moments, sensations

a cohesive picture to make sure i breathed today

even if my hands itched every minute for something sharp, an urge

my hand, my foot, my spleen

how easy to sink a sharp knife into soft feelings and through worn flesh

i wish i knew

how to tell you how i feel without churning my own stomach, without

feeling abusive and selfish

and im sorry for pushing you away but sometimes its so much and i can barely stand myself

and sometimes i need you to let me curl up tight and rip my feelings to shreds before i let you glue me together

my tears erode entire mountains of bone, and i was never taught how to love the river.

you are so good, too good, im sorry.

please hold me down,

because a noose is not a leash

and an island is no place to build a home.

[im-always-write]

i didn't know them

they weren't mine, but--

what would i say

what, what flowers do you lay at the headstone of someone you never knew,

but all around you are crumbling under this new weight

this new loss

and you cant help the jerk behind your sternum

because it's never fair

it's never easy

it's never. good

we are tired of burying our young so early

tired of out-growing friends that should have given us just. one more day

please, live just one more day.

i want it to rain.

it doesnt seem fair the world should care so little.

they're going to lay you in unfamiliar ground, and

the flag they give your father will feel like an insult

dont call them that, you knew, you knew

we tire of mourning our own flowers, and it seems only that the brightest ones are cut too soon

im sorry, god, im sorry

for i know how you must have hurt

and im sorry you were so alone

i'll try to care for them like you

please rest

you've shouldered so much,

oh,

atlas,

go find your peace,

go have your peace,

go be at peace.

[im-always-write]

i can't explain why my bones don't fit, tonight, but i am

unsettled, hypervigilant and dissociative all at once

paranoid and jumpy in my car even as my brain disconnects from my eyes, my ears,

my tethers to this world

i lie in your arms but nothing is settling

and i cant make it better because i don't know how, this

horrible sense of wrongness just wont let me go

tonight and the day before

and the day before

and the day before

i spend. drifting

tied to this body by the fever in my skull and the suffering between my legs

and i have never liked what was in either place

this is a new animal, a rotting albatross placed in my unwilling hands, and all i ever learned to dissect were crows.

my blood jumps and scorches through my veins

and in the mirror i am scared to look because my teeth always feel sharper, and my eyes always feel duller, and each time i feel my reflection takes one more step back, and away

i can't, i can't settle like this,

there's a weight on my spine

and it's cracking and breaking

tearing into my ribcage and all the soft things that are there

and i dont know what it is but it hurts and i hold it in my chest

dark and heavy because im always afraid that if i loosen my grip

my flimsy heart will slip out, and my lungs and my stomach and all of my guts,

and i'll slice myself open on the intercostal space between us

it's a worn metaphor, but

this thing inside me, this

sickness that blackens my veins and clouds my eyes

i don't know how to sit with this, i don't know how to wait

i'm told six months but

how can i hold on that long

already i wake up each day and wonder if it is my last

i'm tired of dragging my soul around, trailing behind my heavy body, beaten, hesitant,

and i am nothing if not a bull, half-dead and stumbling but nonetheless trudging forward, even when i cannot see the road

im so weary of fighting

and exhaustion only heightens the twitch in my hands, shadows lengthening unbidden in my peripherals

there is nothing i can outrun fast enough,

and horse chained to the gate cannot be asked to race, nor to rest

i don't know what i need, but i feel ready to split at the seams,

i'm ready to quit, but i won't, but i won't

i'm so empty

but in this hollow church with oppressive dust, the organ still breathes

for you, for tomorrow, i'll breathe

but please dont ask me where these bones next settle.

i'm afraid they never will.

[im-always-write]

i had the dream, again

where i am lying flat upon hard ground

staring up at a forboding void of stars

the moon is hiding, and there is no sun

and even the stars, tiny pin-pricks of light, offer no familiarity.

frightened, i reach out with both hands,

straining,

grasping for anyone, please

it is so dark

and i am alone

i am so scared.

please.

when i awaken to another dream you are there,

stroking my forehead and speaking soothingly in dream-tongue,

but it is not you and it does not feel right and when you smile it is a wide row of sharpening ivory knives and i am swallowed whole.

i scream, but i do not escape.

i know something is wrong,

i know i have to heal,

but i am not ready yet to rip the scab off a wound too fresh and bleeding still.

until then please be patient,

for at least in all my waking hours

when my bones stretch and creak out towards you, weary and heavy and battered,

i know that i will always

find safety in your arms

[im-always-write]

its crisp, and cool for october and it tastes like nostalgia and panic and i hate it, hate this when the wind whips past me and i choke on my own feet little phantoms writhing around me do you remember? do you remember i love fall, but i want to go back to how it used to be, taste again the innocence and wonder i want to forget you you and your cold autumn afternoons it wasn't, bad that's what i keep telling myself anyway but it wasn't good and every time i come back to the fact that you should have been an adult and i should have stayed away i should have choked down my own rebellion and my thirst for new experiences, but i was so desperate and un-whole that i would cling to anything that promised me life even if it burned, but you were a maturing bonfire and i was a candle and you should have been the adult you shouldn't have wanted me instead of me, it should have it should have been you you should have been the one saying no and now, i can't feel the bite of fall without thinking of you and remembering more than i ever wanted to the pills can make it go away for a little but i always come back to you and how you hurt me i should have said no from the start, when you fed me things i couldnt eat but i didnt complain because i wanted to impress you, when i still vividly remember the texture of your couch the tv show we watched your belt the bus you made me ride home i just wish, out of all of it. i could forget you.

[im-always-write]

in my dreams, it is dark, and i cannot breathe any screams die in my throat, and i only know that i am crying because when i look up at the stars they are unhappy streaks of light bent and streaming crookedly across the fabric of the night sky like some drunk painter, smearing his hand across an unfinished canvas, crying out for inspiration that is not right, i think to myself, as the stars, the only light in a dark, dark sky run away i wish i could but my breath sticks to my ribcage and refuses to leave my throat, building there until my heart implodes building there until my diaphragm bursts and i crumple, like a used tissue i feel dirty, and fragile, and adopt a fear of blowing away in the wind its cold and all i can feel is concrete under my head on my hands in my bones I'd like to sink into the depths of the sea and drown there, i think dying among the most resilient of planetary life poetic, but words dont come so easily when i think about you the night sky is clear tonight, and i am crying i hope that pain has found you where you are.

[im-always-write]

sometimes, i feel a boat a drift upon an ever-wide'ning rift a tiny craft, i buffet so i toss and turn in ocean's throe with only one captain to guide i batten hatches, weather tide and dream so for a harbor far a peaceful docking, 'neath the stars and there, a-waiting on the shore there is a girl, who's so much more she is my beating, aching heart can barely stand be far apart and so in sleep i wish for her only in her arms i'm secure but i must weather this such storm so 'til i return to her form i clutch to me her tokens mine and yearn for her soft, sunny shine until i drift back to you, oh i love you, dear, i love you so

[im-always-write]

late last night i had this dream that lay before my eyes this scene: the ocean black, with rage or blood the sun obscured by clouds above the ocean pounded, wailing screams the fabric of her split at seams she howled along the beach in tears and horrible, her sounds to ears and i felt keenly what she’d lost the weight of her, the weight of cost i stumbled to her murky shore take me, i begged, take me and more tear down these cities, rip this sand heave yourself upon dry land lay waste to what before you lies she turned to me with empty eyes and i fell to my knees and bled the tides around me crashing red the sky, it split, a crack gold-colored rent the sky, my ears i covered as all screamed to her, the sea she ripped herself to shreds, and me and when the chaos all had settled i lay floating, tasting metal staring at an inky sky where no stars shone, no planes flew by the water deathly still, and sick i felt acutely how death ticks and inside, all the ocean’s gore less is less and more is more and all that tar, held within me sank me cold, into the sea and i stared down my water-grave and on that ocean floor i laid and felt how she was dead inside i felt dead too, but could not cry and wished and ached for screams again but there was nothing, naught to rend that had been left in her remains a life of blood, flushed down the drains and i inhaled at last, and glad the air above that drove me mad escaped and i was left with me and inky blackness, and the sea

[im-always-write]

something is broken something is broken and i dont know what it is i dont know how to fix you this is all i have tonight i sat, alone and painfully aware of my own spine and. loneliness i sat for hours in the bathtub i waited until it went cold it didnt bother me not really hours spent thinking about how you fixed this bath, about how you put years years of toil and sweat and fun words i learned as a kid into this home you insulated us and kept us warm and i i dont know how to repay you most days i feel i am an emptying of your pocket children are allowed to be selfish! you have to let me make mistakes! you have to let me live! but i dont want to read your cracked tombstone and wonder if i could have been better i dont want to be the mistakes you see in the eyes of your brothers my face is wet but i want to believe its bath water the drain still doesnt work the best but you tried like me good god, i know you tried i know you wanted more for me than what you had to give but years in gold is not enough i dont know how to be better you always taught me to be better because i was a girl you always pushed me to be better because when you were young there was nothing behind you but your mother one woman determined to survive, you couldnt always have the best but she did what she could for you and back then it was enough i dont. feel like enough and now when you ask me to sit by you i am restless i cant look into the face that raised me anymore and see anything but weariness god, i never wanted the vibrancy to wear out of your bones or your smile to fall they tell you its foolish to dream young but everything was in your hands when the percentiles of the majority fell from your eyes please dont cry please dont you know that i will too we were always more similar than was allowable by my own comfort am i just masking tape wrapped heavily around a once prized vase? or were we porcelain to begin with because i feel that we are broken please, tell me how to fix you something is broken and this is all i have

[im-always-write]

she is the ocean rising, falling slow the weight of sand between my toes the shoreline that i now call home and oh, and oh i love her so she is the mountains capped in snow and strong, and beautiful, i know to find some shelter there i go and oh, and oh i love her so she's the horizon sunset glow and all the stars and moons and so her gravity throws my shadow and oh, and oh i love her so she is the soil, and from her grows a thousand poppies, red aglow she's beautiful, meadow rainbow and oh, and oh i love her so she is a soft breath blanket throw an angel sharing my pillow i pull her close and hope she knows that oh, that oh i love her so

[im-always-write]

so this is what its like then, to separate float adrift this is what its like, then, to be apart alone so this so this, then then this is what its like to not be to not not be to not be whole not whole not whole not whole the words dont come as easily its something about the miles, probably but even when my lips touched yours the last, until the next i felt incomplete could feel, could feel this vein inside me close off, cauterize itself and make numb just, just for now, and i think its supposed to be protection, supposed to be natural, supposed to be good but it doesnt feel safe and it doesnt feel right and it doesnt feel good a drifting satellite, an astronaut pouring love into the universe until you pull me in again