Falling Apart

     You would think, by now, that I would have consumed enough pills to numb the searing hot pain in my soul. But no.
     You would think after 30 bottles of I-forgot-what-they-were that I would have been able to drown you out, even for just a night, just to get some small reprieve from this. But no.
     You would think that after all this time, the blade wouldn't call to me the way that it does. Brain begging on it's knees, practically prostrate on the floor before me, to let it breathe. The torture killing it slowly. But no.
     You would think that after all of the empty nights with strangers who I used to call friends, that I would have been able to get you off of my mind. But no.


Dreams of you still wake me in the early morning
hours, blissful and bittersweet, ripping
me from slumber,
Only to be reminded that I am alone,
It's like saying goodbye all over again.
Over and over and over, every night,
and while, goodbye may have only
lasted there, in that terminal for you -
it haunts me the way images of your face
haunt me if I stop to breathe for even
a single moment,
So I hold my breath, move & barely sleep,
& sleep? I have forgotten how to
do it properly, love,
I am a woman unraveling at
an alarming rate,
Alarming, even to me,
and unraveling is my most
perfected art form, you see,
I cannot fuck it up even if I tried,
Food doesn't stay down,
Drugs don't last long enough, and
What am I supposed to do now?
The knife in my bag seems so
alluring...
What do I do now....

Priory

& it was there,
kneeling in my soul to the
beauty of the abandoned priory,
the kind of beauty that sucks
the very breath from your throat,
that I realized the bitter truth,


I realized that all I loved
and would love forever
was leaving me -
and I could touch it no more,
at least not in this life,


I looked at you and saw the grief
of my impending departure
immolating your heart,
I decided to beg God just one
more time to let me stay,
'Please just let me stay'
and there, in the whispering
wind through empty, leafless trees,
my answer was whispered,


So I drank you as deeply as
I could,
mouth on yours, palm
cupping your face beneath the
facinorous entanglement of
tree-fingers,
You know the kind, the
ones that only a tornado can
comb through,


& I knew our tornado had only just
begun to pull us apart...

Some Days

I'm sifting through my memories again,
Plucking them from my soul
and trying to keep them vivid
so I don't forget you,


& do you know what it's like
to lose touch with all you see?
What it's like to unwillingly
forget paradise?


I try to touch a time
and place where I remember
being whole,
Whole as I will ever be,
& on good days - I graze the
surface with my fingertips,
Come away with the smell of the sea,
the rushing waves,
the sound of petulant rain,
the taste of meat pies
and the feeling of savouring a
pasty, half-hearted, before a
cathedral so breathtaking
that it's beauty had stood the test of time
for thousands of years,
and wondering, absent-minded,
if our love would stand that test, too,


Some days I am not
so vividly fortunate,
Some days I can barely recall the
tiny laugh lines that etched themselves
into your face and continued
to etch deeper the longer we entwined
in time,


I aged you, I know,
Burned my cosmic fingerprint
on your eyes and around your mouth
every time you laughed or smiled,
I hope you don't regret it,
I never will,
I hope even when you're old
and covered with a hundred more
lines and wrinkles -
You think of me...and remember
I marked you first,
Marked you as my very own...

Addict

The pills drop into
my veins one milligram at a
time like water sizzling over
dry ice,
Fog bubbles up from my
blood, swirling in my
brain and for a moment,
finally,
I am at peace,


Petulant shrieks of disordered
mind are sated and placated
with little white spheres,
I sweat insecurities as I sleep
that soak my sheets and matte
hair onto furrowed brow,
I awaken, slick and dizzy
with addiction,


Fumble for my bedside wine,
Sip it to quench my need for
glorious oblivion,
Dropping myself into the perfect
miserable high, steady and eternal,


I am avoiding it - this
gruesome truth that I desperately run
to avoid,
You're not coming
and I am not coming back,


I think if I had known, before,
I would have waited, on
that beautiful, perfect beach day,
until your back was turned,


...and then slipped myself quietly into the ocean,


I would have floated on the
waves, sunshine beaming down on me,
thought about your face,


and just let the water's soft swish and
sway rock me to blissful sleep,
No pills needed, no gun,
no violent macabre ending,
...just float below the surface
and breathe...


Illumination at it's best...

Intro to Dissociation

     My body grows cold and I lose feeling in all of my extremities. No, I am not dying, though I feel as though maybe I should be. The last time I was this numb I was, truly and unforgivably, dead. As in - no pulse. As in - on the other side of life and laughter and breathing and bleeding and hoping and praying and...whatever else we're supposed to do while the heart beats proud in our chest cavity. Whatever, I was dead. Blissfully numb in the arms of someone in the afterlife.
     I drive down the road, 60 degrees outside and sunny, if I'm lucky. It's April but my emotions still say January. Cold. Lifeless. I try to rummage up some feeling in myself to enjoy the buds falling and billowing on pretty Spring air. I imagine England looks rather lovely, albeit slightly wet, right at this moment in time. Indianapolis is not a fucking picnic. Truth? I hate it here. I always have. The only thing I enjoyed as a kid was watching the airplanes take off and thinking to myself "...someday I'm gonna travel everywhere..." but...you can't watch the planes take off in the back of some one's truck anymore. Thanks Osama, you fucking dead prick. I hope you're burning in hell just for that. What a dick move.
     Back to the present - I'm dead, I think. No, seriously, I think I've died. I think this nightly bottle of wine is pouring down the gullet of a corpse. They say people with mental illness are more prone to substance abuse. I think people with mental illness are just eccentric geniuses who are driven to drink by the stupid fucks who come up with that shit. What am I a genius in? Hell if I know. Sarcasm, perhaps.
     My body literally grows fucking numb. Nothing feels real. I am a dream within a dream. They call it: Dissociation. Basically, it means I have checked the fuck out. Do you think I say fuck a lot? You will soon. My mind, being overridden with anxiety, emotional pain, angst, what-the-fuck-ever, decides "No, you're in time out. I'm taking away all of your senses. Go sit with your new friend amnesia."
     I hate amnesia. I can't even remember what you said five minutes ago while dissociated. I can't remember my SSN, my name, my favourite colour, my mother's maiden name, if I forget a password, I'm basically fucked and have to send in a blood sample to prove who I am so I can check my fucking EMAIL. Shitty, right? It strips me of everything but the flesh-suit that I wear on my bones. Which I also hate. Mostly because it's decided to lose all feeling. You could hit me with a searing hot skillet on my inner thigh and I'd probably just ask you what you're cooking because, gee, I'm American and the scent of any fatty carcass cooking must mean delicious food is on it's merry way. Yippee!
     *Unfinished.

Real

Pixels form together,
Piecing together my memories,
For my own internal one's
have abandoned me again,
Eyes drift over places,
faces,
things...
things I should remember
with vivid, brilliant certainty,


Such a strange land
in the abyss of my mind,
As if someone had told me
that I were a foreigner
to my own soul,
That it knows me not,
That I am but passing strange,


How odd to be so alien
to oneself,
to be so weird in one's own eyes
that you lose the ability
to recognize and decode them,
Do they sparkle?
No.
Do they shine?
No.


They are dead,
dead like the memories that
I cannot grasp,


Sylvia said it best
"I think I made you up
inside my head,"
and truly, I do,
Were you ever really real?
Were you just another one of
the delusions...
hallucinations that they swear I am prone
to?


Was I real
back there, in that place?
Just tell me this
if you cannot tell me
another thing,
Was I real?
Was I ever?