I left my heart in the bag I packed you.

I am trapped and lonely. 

And soon, I will feel nothing at all. 

Push through. Push through. Push through. Just get out of here. 

Fuck hospitals. Fuck IVs. Fuck breathing treatments. Fuck everything about this.

My heart broke 
           the moment 
   the glass shattered. 

I heard the sound 
           of collapse
   just after the silence. 

It was so quiet. 

And 
I am so broken. 

This world is consuming me. 

I keep running from the blackness. Keep the depression at bay. Fight off the mania. Abstain from addictions. Don’t break. Don’t fall. Get up. Get up. Get up. You have bills to pay. Rent to make. An education to pursue. Get up—-Get up. Take a shower. Clean something up. Do something. Do anything. Just for the love of fuck, get up. Stop dwelling. You can’t change the past. You can’t change anything. You fucked this up, now fix it. And pay your fucking parking tickets. 

Life events unfold. Here comes the blackness. She’s there. Confused, angry, lonely, desperate. She’s 17 and all you want to do is tell her it only get worse. This ache you feel now is so shallow, so manufactured. Wait a few years, child. Wait until it scars you. Wait until you find out how deep love cuts, how vast oceans feel, how helpless you feel when death consumes hope. Wait until you wake up, delirious and bleeding, and your innocence stolen from you. Wait until you find yourself addicted to anything to stop this emotional bleeding. Wait until you secretly hope for mania just to ease the silence. Wait until you leave your friends behind because you’re too ashamed to go home. Wait until you disappoint everyone you’ve ever known. Wait until you’re hungry and desperate and stranded in unknown cities. Wait until the potential’s gone and all you have is a life of desperate sobriety hoping for reality to crash down into societal collapse. Just wait. It gets so much worse. 

My mind escapes itself by remembering tall grass and cool waters. River pirates and cosplay. Stargazing in unknown fields and wanting to believe. Dissociation and needles. It always goes back to floating in agony. 

Its been seven months since I started actively protesting. Most people ask me why I risk arrest and bodily harm for corporate corruption. I can’t tell them it isn’t about that. I can’t look them in the eye and tell them why I scream and cry and push and shove for something better than this.

I’m not sure what it feels like to be part of the lost generation. Where you’re not sure if your efforts are worth it because you can’t tell if in two years you’ll kill yourself or the world will kill you.

I keep getting told every generation has it rough. But I’m working myself to collapse and still go to sleep hungry. They don’t tell you the food bank isn’t open on weekends and food stamps are only eligible for application during Monday through Friday. You can’t apply for help if you’re working. They force you to choose. Sheltered and hungry or well fed and homeless. I’ve had to fight to feed myself. Bleed myself for plasma for gas. Put my body on the line for scientific research to pay for the next utility bills. These shoes were given to me at the homeless shelter. I’ve had to panhandle for change just to buy a 99 cent coffee to charge a phone in a McDonald’s. I get so angry when people tell me “every generation has it rough.” You don’t know rough. I survive on stale bread and quarters found on the floorboards for gas. You don’t know rough.

I get angry when we’re told our protesting is directionless. That we’re whining and drug addicts and anarchists without a cause. Most people don’t realize we are futureless and motherless. That everything you’ve given us is diseased. That each day is another day closer to collapse. Montreal marches for tuition reform. Chicago black blocs for peace. New York strikes for worker’s rights. Frankfurt is rioting for anti-austerity measures. They don’t tell you why we really march. That each day we inch closer to the edge and something needs to change.

My mother tells me the world is collapsing because we want something for nothing. I don’t blame her for feeling this way. Her generation doesn’t understand that our generation IS working for nothing. That we have no future. That half of us are unemployed, not because we want to be, but because there’s nowhere left to go. And that we want some kind of hope in our government so we don’t go hungry, so that we don’t die early from preventable diseases, so that we have a future. These demands are our last remaining hope.

We’re told better surveillance and stricter terrorism laws will keep us safer. That if we just vote and participate in civics, things will change. That if we watch government fed news outlets, we will hear the truth. But all I see is pain. All I see is darkness. And I can’t tell if working myself to collapse will change anything at all. Work harder. Network better. Schmooze. Obey. Consume. Go fuck yourself. Everything we were told is a lie. Nothing is working. Everything is diseased.

Eventually hunger stops hurting.  Like an abused child, this blackness will feel normal. That’ll be when they win. When we’ve given up. When we scar over. Its been seven months since I started actively protesting. Most people ask me why I risked arrest and bodily harm for corporate corruption. I can’t tell them it isn’t about that. I can’t look them in the eye and tell them why I want to scream and cry and push and shove for something better than this. But my feet are tired and I am so close to giving up.

I’m never going to find what I’m looking for.

I can still feel that cold, damp heartache after my mother received word of her mother’s sickness. The windows were open and it was beautiful outside. The cat bathed in the sunlight. I listened to the sounds of springtime. Then a crash. A sob. And at that moment, I knew my mother was no longer immortal. 

Its 2 AM and I’m in another world. I’ve moved on. I’m healing. I’m almost whole again. I hope this isn’t temporarily stability. That high I get from perpetual change. That relief I feel from freneticism. I’m in the realm of the real now. This is inescapable. I can’t go back now. I have to keep moving, keep pushing, keep healing. My life depends on it. My job depends on it. My clients depend on it. I have to keep going in this direction of mental and emotional change. I’ll lose myself if I don’t. I’ll lose you if I don’t.

And yet…

So much of me wants to hurt again. I can’t let myself fall back on old habits. I miss spiraling and injecting myself and floating in agony. I miss sobbing in the darkness and bleeding out without warning. I miss that ache that bubbles to surface and spreads like poison. I miss the burning need to hurt until I felt nothing else. Depression is insidious. This is Stockholm Syndrome of the mind. How long can I keep up this life of good health and good choices and sobriety? How soon until this reality of hope turns back into a facade? How soon until I can float in agony again?

Saint Olga, watch over me.

1. The Union Negotiator

I have a deal for you:
tonight when I sleep I’ll think of you.
Of red rocks, of bull pens and spurs,
Kansas Turnpike, of Missouri,
how you’ll meet me there,
a continental divide, the places where two ends meet.
My legs will make a circle around you, your waist;
my lips will have secrets to slip over yours like a paper bag.


2. The Cartographer

I am land-locked. I am Paraguay at sunset, something swallowing
the sun beyond banana trees. I heard it once drop like a bomb
into clay; no one made a sound while the echo had its way
with ears across a jungle. I am land-locked here.
There are roads out in all directions; veins, but no seaways.
I will find you in water,
I will be the way you breathe.


3. The Neurologist

How you connect these gaps between cities:
electrical charges, phone lines. I am with you in an instant
and back again, the other side of a world, a coin.
A pulse felt in fingers; you are alive, burrowed beneath folds
of flesh. The way flesh folds you inside,
the way the brain cuts corners at all costs.


4. The Performance Artist

A cup of tea
on a saucer
on the west edge of a round table.
You are the tea,
I am sipping you, I might be
the scone.


5. The Tailor

I wrapped parts of you around me for warmth
and it worked: your arm as a stole, the barrel of your chest
a place for my lips to hide, your legs as leather belt.
I drew chalk doodles on the bedsheets, you said, What for?
I said, I will stitch a knock-off from your sweat.


6. The Demolitionist

There is a moment between plunge and blast, where I live,
these seconds. Where there is perfect and quiet calm,
an exhale and a resignation, I will crumble.
This wreckage is a series of broken bricks;
remember what it was, that moment:
the world pressing in. I am a window on the fourteenth floor,
I see where the city ends, the roads failing into dust.


7. The Palm Reader

Your hand sliding down my back knows omens
when it sees them. The patterns change, but all these lines
were once people the way you and I were once people.
This compass its own rose, all directions lead back to the center,
back to your cheek, your earlobe. This palm
knows your face, where it belongs: resting there.

nevver:

Magnificent Ruin

Its all meaningless and my mind encapsulates me in the static of solitary confinement and existential angst. I’m too entrenched in this novel to stop wondering how it ends.

But I stay with you because it feels like there’s maybe a chance for real meaning here. Even though rational thinking suggests otherwise. Even though we might crash and burn and I’ll end up alone and addicted again.

But for now, and that glimmer of hope within me wants to say for always: You are my Calcifer.

“We can get better. We can be successful, in whatever way we define success. We can be healthy and happy and whole and prove them all wrong. We can do this. Together. I’ll graduate and you’ll help people, and we’ll both be sober and stable. We might not have a lot of money and its going to be hard, but we’ll be happy. Shaun, I need you. I can’t do this without you.”

Why bother staying?

We are
   hips and hands
      and lips and
         chests and a
            tangled mass of
     legs and sweat and
   hope.
I.
We are
      Flustered hips
   grinding 
        thrusting
      begging for
          sexual singularity.
We are
      Interlocked hands,
   grasping
        clutching
      grappling for
          unknown intimacy.
We are
      Fluttered lips,
   whimpering
        groaning
      hissing for
          divine rescue.
We are
      Dampened chests,
   heaving
        gasping
      yearning for
         lost time.
II.
We are
   the climax
       and we are
          the conclusion.
   Poetry and cacophony.
         Verse and harmony.
We are
   the offertory
      and we are
         the Gloria.
   Ritual and disbelief.
         Impulse and certainty.
We are
   the machine
      and we are
         the wanderer.
   Deus ex machina and resistance.
         Intervention and surrender.
We are
   the clockmaker
      and we are
         the warhead.
   Destruction and composure.
         Instability and silence.
III.
We are
      skin
        against  
      skin
   and
      fire
        by
      friction
We are
   feverish
        delirious
              punch-drunk
   and
     reckless.
We are
   hips and hands
      and lips and
         chests and a
            tangled mass of
     legs and sweat and
   hope.