When do I know I’ve gone too far?
How many more times will I twist
This knife in my chest before
Letting the handle go?
Where will I run next?
Where can I go when my bridges are aflame
And I can hardly see through the smoke?
How…
How will this finally end?
What will they say when it does?
What will I?
So this is what falling apart feels like.
My seams are ripped anew
but there’s no blood left to run from these wounds I’m…done.
I’m empty.
I hid it and kept the stitches so tight but tonight
my long white grip on control is failing like I do
and I miss you.
There.
Words I can’t bear to have my heart think but
she’s screaming at me now so I remind myself
to hate you.
I look at the frayed threads
The hollow limbs
The shell that’s put away its soul because she hurts too much
And the thought of being proven right isn’t enough to give me quiet.
I have to hate you
Or I’ll really begin to feel nothing
And she’ll die when she doesn’t deserve to.
Don’t mistake it for blue flamed rage because it isn’t.
I hate with what little is left – there aren’t enough embers to detest
The hatter that shouldn’t have covet
Or the wolf that came as a rabbit promising adventure if I’d only follow:
“Quick little Alice”, quick to the gallows
I wish I had lost my head…instead of all the rest.
I wish I, and my tired soul, could forget.
Fingers dance with shadows on the ceiling and
faint light filtering through the gaps between them take away the night’s sharper edges
and I fill the quiet with lilting piano that begins to lull…
But anxiety coils in my chest,
a troublingly comforting weight pressing into my lungs
tugging at the droplets forming at the corner of my eyes without real reason
wrapping itself around me in a reminder of just who I am though I had briefly forgotten.
The outstretched hand above me feels a separate entity, chasing shadows still, playing while I watch, while I think too much:
About wonderland and Cheshire cats and madmen with hats just like mine,
About Guillotines and dead priests and metal that binds.
And I want to tell you all my secrets,
here in almost-darkness where we’ve hidden ourselves from the world-
here where my other hand lays between us with fingers intertwined with yours-
here where you have invaded my chest and taken hold-
Here where like a moth to a flame, like Icarus to the sun, I am drawn to you and I want nothing more than to be devoured,
But I’ve lost all my words.
Lost all my words like I’ve lost track of time here,
like I’ve lost track of how afraid I should probably be
of feeling this safe-
of feeling this sane-
of how quickly returned anxiety leaves
Of forgetting my heart is a rock that bleeds because
I love…
I need…
I want…
I ache…
I feel.
I want to cloak myself in silence.
I want to be alone in a universe of my own,
To exist with no one –
The first being
Or the last.
I think:
Maybe if I tilt my soul so some of the madness leaks into their own atmospheres they will begin to understand,
when their undisturbed galaxies have a few
of my burning planets.
But I attempt to speak and
A tangled mess falls from my lips and we all stare as it hangs there in the air…
What choice exists but to shove it away while I have some dignity left?
I beg again and again for silence,
for peace,
for escape,
for time that should be mine yet
In the same breath that I wish I no longer had to exist
I must remind myself I don’t have that option.
In the same breath that I wish they could understand
I must understand why they cannot.
I sit with my feet stretched over the edge
Further over it than anyone seems to realize,
More in need to control how quickly I will fall than I have ever been.
“I think only of you”
And I will choke on all your good intentions
as I fall deeper still,
and forget how to breathe
having lost my will,
doing that which I abhor
in pursuit of when I wanted more.
But time
and it’s persistent ticking,
and obsessive compulsion to go forward
stays as fundamentally unchangeable as it always has,
and I am dull at the edges…
bitter where I’ve lost my bite
pen leaving scratches where it no longer bleeds – a shell of itself
held by the shell that is me,
tanks nearing empty
too far beneath the sea
When morning came I was swept away with it.
Tiny fingers of sunlight dragged me kicking and screaming
I wanted the night.
But the windows stood open and the drapes were pulled back
I was left exposed…
reaching for covers I assumed would be there.
My last lines of defense, fallen.
All I wanted was silence
I who feared being truly alone
longed for the quiet stillness
longed for the comfort of darkness
longed for nothingness but most importantly
silence.
Far too suddenly my reality had changed –
and my love along with it.
There were few I trusted within these walls
but now they too are gone,
slipping away while I slept.
Electricity replaced the razors in my veins
while torment reigned in the wake of betrayal…
I made a single request
yet the sun found it’s way in,
yet it dared to wake me:
reminding me that I dwell among the living
though I am little more than dead.
It was nothing until it was everything.
Music and
breathing and
living and –
so much…
Falling as easy as being alive;
blurring the lines and finding it more beautiful than
anything I’ve ever created.
Thankful.
It was everything
until it was nothing.
Just silence and
drowning and
existing and –
never enough…
Pulling the drapes closed and the curtains down
not knowing till I was stumbling around in the dark
waiting for applause that never came.
Forgetful.
Starting to fall asleep,
lulled into the nightmarish daydream:
a paradoxical bitter-sweet guilty pleasure that
always ends the same way.
A little too honest?
No picket fences?
No cheap applause?
Every story has a beginning…
but it’s only a means to its end.
An inelegant tangle of limbs and strings
just beneath the hands that let go,
am I a real boy now?
The world is made of ‘I told you so’s
and resolute silence,
and my voice is gone because it was never truly my own,
and my painted smile still hangs in it’s place
though I am out of mine
out of my mind
with nothing but time
on my wooden hands.
And you,
with your condescending offer to give me life,
and your hands still gripping the cross,
wanting me to want –
wanting me to beg –
to be strung up once again.
It’s never enough that I break…
I have to be broken,
and you must put me back together:
One hand will save and
the other will torture.
And I will love and hate them both in equal measure.
Painted nails are made to
hammer into flesh till
you have finished putting
yourself on a cross.
The pen in your hand
is the double edged sword
plunged again and again into your sides
till you are satisfied.
Martyrs with megaphones,
we have become:
Pointing to the battered hearts
we tacked on our shoulders
because the world has stopped its revolving…
around us.
Lying awake
counting stars
I’m starting to think there’s darkness in all of us.
Before I thought
we were inherently light
that the darkness is what we avoid
but here in this nothingness
where my only light is stars now falling
I feel it again –
unsure…of what I’ve been told.
Everything has changed.
Suspicions are reborn.
The oracle speaks.
Then the oracle is silent.
And what are we left with?
Fewer stars
and greater darkness,
more from within than without.
KN 