You Told Me to Die, Now I Can't Think Straight.

I am giving it all that it's worth
To crack through the bones of a child's birth
And wondering how the fish manage to sleep at night
With all that moving 'round it just don't seem right
Now I'm reflecting on those things that you said to me
I guess they weren't that bad, but they truly bled me
I don't think there's anything I can do about it...

Now you will find me up against a wall
Now you will find me crawling down the hall
Now you will find me on the tile floor
Now you will find me at the beach, wondering...

How the fish manage to sleep at night?
With all that moving 'round it just don't seem right
I watch the waves loving the shore
And wish that I knew how to love more
Now you're trying to take me home
And I would rather be left alone.
You'll drag me back, and I'll comply
As you lovingly tell me that this time things will go right
But I just want to walk into the waves and see
How the fish manage to sleep at night
Turned upside down, or softly floating upright?
I want to be a heavy ball that doesn't bob for air
And not your girl with blue eyes and long hair

I'll never stop thinking, wondering
How the fish sleep down there
Then I wake up, gasping for air.

Paranoia for Dead People

What if it took off my hand
What if it took off my arm
It smells like antiseptic and I'm selfish
It's grating to go through the seasons
And it's tiring to walk to the end of the street
My stop is next and I'm glad
Because I'm gagging from the dentist office smell
Even the smallest sounds are ringing in my ear now.

How do dead people feel.

“You’re so much more than the crack in my side
You’re the only thing that keeps me alive.”

I scrape out the words on cardboard and pieces of paper. I have been too listless to try and figure out what it really means to me. These days I write down the words first and just hold on to the rhythm of them. Meanings… don’t really mean much anyways.

I can give it any meaning I want to in retrospect, later, when I feel better. My mind will be more vivacious, hungry and beating again soon. I just need rest now.

Grave News: The Year Long Feeling

Grab a grain from a clock and toss it into the sink
The subterranean world of dishes as they clink
Dully under water and a thousand grains more
Of all the rice I didn't want that I bought at the store
Floating sadly and swelling
Crisp color is draining
And everything is a shade of grey and it's all blending together between the blades of the knives that were all used for butter and the residue coagulates and one falls and crushes
slowly into a sponge and emits small rays of light that somehow fell through the window and turned white in the
water

An entire year I've been angry that I can't sleep every day.
I've just wanted to sit and be very quite...
But I can't
I can't, so I crawl on the floor just to make it out the door and hope that the world will swallow me whole so that I don't have to go to work anymore.
I do not turn on the lights when I get home, it is dark forty five minutes later
I'd rather drown in the grey rice water than light up the room and see all the places where there should be faces or a painting or a desk or something to dust or somewhere to rest
I want to walk through the house and know I won't trip til I fall in my bed and wait for a dream or a nightmare to start flickering in my hollowed out skull.

Featured on SYWZine on April 11th. 

Grave News: What Does it Mean to be Hollowed Out?

I woke up to a flood of light coming through the tiny slats in the blinds. It was too painfully bright, even with the blinds being as tightly shut as was possible. There was no going back to sleep, but I stayed in bed anyways. The light was so intense, I became lost in noticing the way it transformed my room into something much more crisp and colorful than usual. The light was uplifting, powerful. I could tell the pace of the flow of clouds outside by the way the light dimmed and brightened, the flood swelled and receded into my square space which was my entire world at the moment. After becoming completely absorbed in the movement of light and shadow outside of my room, I felt a timing with it, as if the heaving and lessening of the light was in unison with the slow and steady beating of my heart. And that’s when I felt it… when I realized how slowly my heart was beating, how I felt no motivation to move and barely enough to breathe… I could feel more than ever how sorrow was a physical burden. It does not just weigh on your mind… keeping you from thinking. It has a physical manifestation, a weight that you can feel in your hand, like a fist sized ball of condensed, concentrated mass. And that heaviness, that single, smooth ball… it sits in the pit of your stomach, making you feel always empty, but with no desire to be full… from there it pulls down your muscles in your shoulders, it makes you hunch over, distorts your spine. It emanates coldness from your core outward, and after a while, its pull on your muscles stops straining them and simply makes them feel limp. You stop fighting against the heaviness, and you willingly let it pull you down… your head stooping so low that you let it go to the floor and curl yourself into a ball around the ball within you… becoming one with the terrible weight of pitiable misery. 
The light swelled powerfully, and I felt a mutual dramatic, upheaval within myself. I could throw that heaviness out, I could vomit it out, hurl it from myself, forcibly carve it, cut it out of myself. I didn’t have to live with it; I could be ok if I wanted to… I have power over myself… 
I tried to stay with the sweeping mood of the light as long as I could; I tried hard to pretend to not notice the dimming of the light again… I rushed to throw the covers aside and throw myself out of the bed in one movement. I pulled open my top dresser drawer and felt myself sinking already. I was beginning to lose momentum as I had to make the tedious and every day decision of what to wear. I stared at the contents of the drawer for several moments before realizing that there was nothing there that I would wear. I closed it slowly and opened the next. I started to convince myself that what I was doing was pointless… how was I supposed to dress myself if I didn’t know what I was doing? And if I sat down to first decide what I was doing, that moment of randomness would be gone, that mood I felt would have sunken already, the day was already lost, it slid like oil from my cupped hands, leaving an uncomfortable residue behind. I lulled myself into accepting the justification that one action would just destroy the next, and finally I decided to lie back down in bed. After all, I had all the time in the world. Nothing had to be done today. I had enough in the bank for the rent for the next few months still. I could always have my job back when I needed it. There was no need… for anything today. 

The Pull

...          Gravity gravity gravity.

I can feel something pulling at me, from below. I’m stuck to the ground, I always have to be touching it, touching something that is touching it. Have I ever been completely off the ground? I’ve never been on a plane…

It pulls and pulls and over the years I’ll sink more and more into it, it will pull me close, until I’m dying, so that it can whisper in my ear as I finally lay panting against the ground… what does it want to tell me? Why does it pull me.

I could lean down… and tell it not to pull me, not to force me. I’ll fall down eventually, when I’m tired. But it is a forceful and possessive lover; it will not let me go. We’re always touching, we’re always near; it’s constantly reminding me that it is there. And I just want to be left alone for a moment, one moment for me. I g o into the hallway. I slam the door behind me. It is still there. We are still sole to face. I go into the kitchen, open the fridge. It is there deciding with me, peering at the jars, mulling over the sealed plastic bags, humming at the vegetables in the crisper. I’m not hungry. It isn’t either. I sit on a bar stool, my feet leave the ground, and it panics, it’s pulling, it’s creeping up through the wooden legs, and I can feel the heaviness of my body with each breath. I step off the barstool and it sighs with relief and I can feel everything in me sink to my feet as it desperately pulls at me. It will never cease its pull. So I crumple into a pile on the carpet and let it caress me.