At Least the Trap had an Escape Latch.

I didn't have to chew off my leg. The trap was gently released, which maybe hurts more. Watch that relationship status like a hawk child, it'll change fast and leave me spinning.

Once again against my better judgement I opened it. I let a new voice in, a new color to wrap my brain and heart in knots.

HOWL at the moon baby, because I'm a lone wolf. And when you go against your blood, nature punishes you. Yearn for a hearth, but sleep in twigs and snow.

Yearn for an embrace, but only my own arms will hold me.

My Own Fingers Betray.

I read back on these self-pitying blatherings, and I am vaguely disgusted with myself.

To allow oneself to wallow in self deprecation and self flagellation is pointless. Why use my words to fight? Why use them to fight myself? I'm indulging my inner teenager. If I don't stop I'll be locked in my room painting suitcases and saying things that only make sense to me. But I won't. Not ever again. The human condition and the battle against it cannot be given sanctuary, for to do so sanctifies it in my heart. And I do play the martyr so well.

This melancholy cannot be allowed or granted dominion. I internalize all of it, sucking my tongue and tapping my feet. Like the song says, along with my heartbeat hammering in my chest. It feels like a bell, ringing and ominous. The sound of my own heartbeat produces colors in my mind that are sickly and unpleasant. A surging churn of oxblood faded in fear.

I'll stoke the lines of my throat where it is softest, and feel my beauty. I'll sing my songs until my voice breaks, and I shall feel the freedom. And I will love. Regardless of outcome. I will not be Ophelia, drowning in sorrow and madness.

The golden apple has been thrown. I've decided not to pick it up this time. Let the other girls play, and Eris have her due from them. I have chosen. And my due has already been paid.

Paid in blood, paid in pain. Paid in small casual cruelties. Paid in my own avarice and preening.

I am not tragic. Nor will I let myself become so. I have the tools. I'm no Sylvia Plath, trapped in a world not ready. The world stretches before me. The cosmos stretch before me.

And all I must do is reach out my hand, close my eyes, and let myself fall.

Maybe I'll hit the ground. Perhaps someone will catch me. Or, fate permitting I shall break my own fall.

Psyche? Are you ready to tuck and roll? Let's go.

So Many Notions, Potions, And Stories...

How do I explain it all? The illness, the trauma, my losing the genetic lottery.

I'm willing to expose myself this time. Willing to lay bare and under scrutiny. But I fear that once everything is stripped away I'll be more trouble than I'm worth. Not a sound investment.

Are your eyes grey or blue? I still haven't figured it out.

My heart palpates in my chest and I cover it as a cough. My tremors come and I shrug them off. I turn in ways to hide the scars of what was done to me, all screaming and tearing and blood.

Who could want such a thing?

It Sucked Me Dry

I had so many words and images knocking around in my head. I was filled with inspiration and with one look out the window into the cold grey rain...My fingers froze over the keyboard. My fingers stuttered.

It was washed out of me like a gum wrapper floating towards a gutter.

How The Mighty Crumble.

I see you. I see though the masks you have up, the veils you have drawn. You think you are sly and subtle, but you are like a rough brick smashing though the emotions of others. Selfishness. I see it in so many, but am shocked to see it in you. You would be shocked as well, but cannot shake the binding of resentment and jadedness. Why can't you see a sparkle, instead of a blemish? Or rather, why wont you?

At least this time I won't be the one responsible for the fallout.

Nobody Knows Me At All...

I was asked so often as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I would always bare my teeth in a fake stretched smile and give the answer all adults like from a small girl child. "I want to be a horse trainer! I want to be a doctor. I want to save people like fireman do!"

But I was lying through my teeth. I want to be nothing to most. I want to be something to some. And I want to be everything to one.

Because in the end, it's really all that matters. I've never been driven by career. I am completely unambitious. As long as I have my books and instruments I'll twirl alone on my slick bedroom floor.

It has always been love. My ceaseless obsession with it. It's complexities, how it's the most powerful force driving humanity; this ultimate evolutionary fail-safe.

Nobody wants the sick girl. I see it in their eyes...the wondering. When will it happen again? For it will. It's a factual and eventual reality. How could I ever ask someone to stand by me through it, to share the pain?

I couldn't ever.

I am not afforded the luxury of a different path.

Pressed by These Souls

I crave solitude, or some semblance of it. I hear and feel the breathing in other rooms. Tapping sounds creep into me, a cough, a laugh, a sigh.

I wish I could go to an ice hotel.

Why?

I need to stop constantly overthinking every single thing. My thoughts spin off in countless patterns and calculations, and I grow paranoid.

Did You Kiss the Envelope?

My beautiful secret almost lover. How you've surprised me. Handwritten letters mailed to my door, songs written and sent over these electronic conductors, causing endless whorls of thought.

We want nothing from each other, but I am so soothed and this is burning so hot and so fast I know we'll burn out.

I am struck with discomposure, but I like being off balance. Swaying with the clandestine crescendo, I know it will never be consummated.

Which, to my dismay makes this even more tender than I could have ever conjured.

Strings and Wires and Cables..

I heard your voice through the wires, all tangled and tired. I heard my voice repeat back to you, gravelly and worn out. Mutual melancholy.

But it's the words that catch me, the words that shake me. I fall into them, spiraling and bound. When I hear your mouth forming sounds, I shiver with the color of the timbre. It cannot be replicated, duplicated. It is a color like an oil slick, my heart pumps that color wildly in my chest. It shakes me, shakes me so violently I feel as though my ribs will crack and I shall lie upon the floor splayed like a broken dolly.

And all I can feel is shame. Because I don't love you. And I will never again. What you seek from me you sought too late, my precious friend.

A Maudlin Little Cry.

In the end, when it comes down to it, we are alone. No one can hold your hand into oblivion. A brain scanned at the moment of death is astonishing. The matter, the energy is sucked out hungrily by an unfathomable force.

The force of eternal solitude.

It's true what Conrad said. "We live as we dream; alone."

Sometimes I feel like Crooked Finger from Antonia's Line.

Big Fish, Little Fish...

Please let me be a mermaid. Let me swim out into cold and murky green depths.

I'll sing songs with fish, cut my hair with crab claws. I'll stretch out on stinging coral beds, my blood bleeding gold. A non human ichor.

The only times I ever truly feel free is when I am singing, or when I am swimming in a cold river with a hard current.

I often wonder if people who drown give themselves up to it. Maybe they just let go, and are pulled into an endless swirling adventure. Or maybe they just fucking drown in abject terror.

The current urges, slurps at my will. It sings to me, calls to me. I know it wants me for I want it. Crushed between the moon and the ocean, I hear the constant call.

A Bubbling Cauldron of Anger.

I want to shed my skin, peel back layers of muscle. I want to pull out my bones and crack them so that the marrow runs, all oxidized and sluggish.

My technological shackle pings. Another one, sniffing about. At first I liked it, felt the confidence rise and my swagger build. But now I feel chained to it.

Every time I turn on the television, I'm told to mate. My body betrays me, biological clock hammering away. I want to stay alone. But this concavity, this hollow hole in my chest begs to differ.

Even now I bare my teeth, alone in my room tapping away at this fucking keyboard. I feel threatened, challenged. My mind says I am enough for me. My body says otherwise.

Nothing stops it. Not seas of alcohol or handfuls of pills. Not billowing clouds of smoke, or even bloodletting.

I feel trapped. Caged. And furious.

Circled, not cubed.

This pain cycle, this spinning vortex I have trapped myself in must stop.

But the sounds come in. Winding through my spinal column upwards to my temples, and I am caught. The clinging net has been cast. It smothers me, even though it is as light as webbing.

The thoughts racing round, spinning and whirling like a chipped ballerina in an old music box. Tinny and muted, sickly and unkind.

When you're born bad, how do you pull the darkness out? I'm kicking out the legs of the stool, one by one. I'm dangling, fighting. FIGHTING to be good. Battling to not use all of my words to fight.

This creature, this consciousness, this fountain of cyclical and trembling terror is what I am. But I fight. And I will fight myself. I will win. Or I will suffocate.

No-one can touch me, truly. Hate me. I hate myself harder. Push me. I push myself closer to the precipice. Pull me. I'll cartwheel into oblivion, laughing all the way.

See me. I'll see you. I will turn, to at least see you. I want nothing from you. Just to look. And everyone wants to be seen, if even just once.

Before I hop the banister of madness, and slide all the way down with shrieking mirthful howling.

I felt my heart flutter and for once wasn't scared.

I walked to the coffee shop today, after having hidden all quiet and clean in my bedroom.

The moment I stepped outside was intensely beautiful. I walked slowly, lengthening my stride and slowing the revolution of my hips. It was like I was in a trance.

The wind whispered by me, all around my body like benevolence personified. It was real to me, and alive; this elemental kiss.

My hair spun out of it's tie and twirled in the breeze, like something I'd read in a wistful novel. It was a moment of intransigent beauty. And it still lingers on my skin...

Dust Buster out That Skull Girl..

I sloughed the snakeskin, kicked off the layers of ruffles and petticoats that were was dragging me down into the deep further that is that unwanted part of my consciousness.

I screamed wordlessly, but as loudly as I could; "STOP!"

My head fills with bright white noise, so painful and deafening inside of my skull. I clasp my hands over my ears futilely when this happens, barely being able to gasp, all in a rigor. Afterwards everything is more vivid.

The sound of mucus rattling in my throat when I clear it are chipped alabaster charges. The Am chord I strum is violet and bordered.

My insides are a topsy turvy Wonka like land.

Walking and Talking With Nonsense Pouring Out...

There, in that tiny room I am supposed to find salvation. Surrounded by strangers who turn their eager hungry faces towards mine.

Is this where I'll find it? Humility, forgiveness, and peace? Under flickering florescent lights that make hollows where there were none in my eye sockets?

Sucking my tongue, I recount my evils. Tapping my nails, I avert my eyes. I have a shiny metal disc again. They collect and clink together in my wallet.

Does it even mean anything?

Kern Park Beckons.

I am smashing out my addiction today. I'm going to weave through the sidewalks, stepping on cracks and sunspots. I'll float like a feather in a Nico song, and walk through the doors. Those blue eyes. They burn me, burn into me. And they look exactly like mine. Maybe they are mine.

Sweaty skin to skin contact, an instant surge of desire and terror. I am so nonchalant in my wariness. But now, it is time to peel and open the cocoon. I have pupated. Like a feather in the sulfurous air of my neighborhood, next to the burned out and blackened car.

And the Cardinal Hits the Window...

I picked up Dusty first thing this morning, tuning and coaxing sounds from her tired strings. The window is open, and birds sing, and insects crawl about in my yard.

I thought of Jackie, and played and sang Casimir Pulaski Day, not expecting my voice to break and tears to fall.

Cancer of the bone. It stole her vibrancy. It robbed us of her presence. It washed her away like she never was.

Slipping..

My birthday is tomorrow. Another year shaved away, and I feel no different.

Gentle is a Foreign Concept.

I have a decision to make. Do I shut myself up again, close myself off like a painted vestal virgin? Or do I open my body, open it so wide it could split in two.

Cloistered in my bedroom, pacing and singing. Locked in, staring out and painting on suitcases. A safe prison of my own design. But a prison nonetheless.

But I've done this before. I know that I can slam the floodgates closed, wrap my heart back up in steel and tin and razorwire. If it jumps, my metal prickly fence will contain it.

But that is cowardice. To smile, to constantly pantomime.

I have no middle ground. My emotions run too hot, too cold. I can never be room temperature, never medium. My heart is beating, so I know I'm alive. And I hate it. I hate feeling my heart beat. It terrifies me. But I need to know I'm alive, and real.

I just want someone to see me.

Rip Us to Shreds...

Humans weren't born with talons. We did not evolve with clawed hands.

How is it then, I wonder that we are so adept at shredding each other? I feel like if we could see through people, most would appear as tatters.

It beats my will down every day. I smile at the woman on the street, and am greeted with a cold face and a vacant stare. I give my heart to a small shy man, and he casts it aside like so much garbage. I see a mother on the bus slap her small beautiful child.

It's a bog, and right now I'm sinking.

And I woke up screaming again...

No more twitches, little mini seizures gripping me. My throat is burned by the name I screamed over and over in my sleep, a name that I don't think humans can make with their mouths.

I dreamed of blood caked sheets, and slitted eyes. Being held. Being held down. I can never hit hard enough, scream loud enough.

Sometimes in my dreams I don't have hands, or a mouth. I wander like a vagrant, weeping for I cannot wail. These things should not spill over into my wakefulness.

And they take and they take and they take..

On some days I feel amorphous, and uncontainable. I listen to my headphones, and focus as hard as I dare in public to not dissolve.

I feel like parts of me slither off, like spiraling ghosts of negative ectoplasmic intention to suck the energy of strangers. I can feel them in my sphere, sometimes even taste them as I slide past. Sometimes, when I walk by certain people, and their pheromones hit my nostrils and slams up to my brain all I can think is HUNGRY.

Why does this unnerve me so? What is it from them I am hungry for?

It trickled down the bathtub drain, burping all the way.

Maybe it's age. Or the seas of alcohol and other things I find to use as life analgesics to wash it all away. But how can I shake it off this fast?

I am bothered, but not cowed. I'm not afraid anymore of pain. My heart chipped and cracked and shook loose like plaster. But now I feel relief. Even freedom.

Am I free? Or am I riding the edge?

I suppose we'll know soon enough.

A sociopathic lover, like a subtle noose...

Lure me with sweet words and soft feathery touch. Lure me with deep looks and slyly divulged secrets.

I've got to shake you off, wash you from my sheets and body. Let you pool and sluice off me down the shower drain.

How it must feel to you. Does it feel like victory? Or is it a bittersweet prophecy you force yourself to fulfill over and over again?

Thank you for sacrificing me on the alter of your callousness. I needed to be reminded. Wash those stars out of my eyes. All that's left behind now are the traces of makeup that tears couldn't flush out.

You. Fucking. Asshole.

Really, you think it's a metaphor? Naw.

A special type of man loves their toys. They shine and sparkle, they make wonderful sounds. These objects can bend and twist and gasp and twine around them.

And when the toy is done or tarnished, this particular breed takes as great a pleasure in the destruction and crumpling of the once cherished plaything as they did in discovering it's character and features.

I always pick the wrong pony.

The tides shift...

When all else is stripped bare and away and the raw nerve of it is all peeled back, I am still a child. Shivering and shaking.

Like a caged animal my heart starts to race, the fear grips me. To be laid open and exposed. To be stripped down to the bone. It fills me with abject terror.

Lay back, I tell myself. My fists ball tightly, and I pace my wooden floors. I examine my books, my shells, the items in the tiny boxes I hide away secretly for myself. Just let go, I tell myself.

I have freely given the ability to hurt me away, and now I have to wait and watch and see. Can I hold up under the intensity of my own scrutiny? I'll push this time. I'll fight for what I want. I won't hide my face away. I won't smother my passion. I won't run away.

FUCK IT.

Throw your arms up girl, and jump. The falling is the best part. Do it for once.

I lay down my life again...

Will this be a pantomime? I can wear a mask so well....

I have a firm resolve, but resolve is easily obliterated by emotion.

Could I pull forth from this wrecked and untidy tragedy a usefulness in heartbreak? Like a seed. An intangible piece of freedom could uncurl, force the razor-wire off of my heart like ivy breaks down chain-link fences.

Rollercoasters can be exhilarating too, but they have always terrified me. Maybe I just need to fling my arms up and say fuck it. I do believe it is time to take a ride.

Some sort of snake moan....

I want to combust like a column of fire. Hold my hand and we'll burn. Pull my hair back and sink your teeth into my shoulder blade and we'll burn. Burn and scream, and be cinder and smoke and ash.

We can melt together, screaming pleasure into the dark, scratching and gnawing bursts of ecstasy and oblivion out of the sinuous thrust of my hips blistering all of it away, until only a scorched patch of a moan remains.

This is what I want.

Turn the light on inside of me...

I tossed and turned last night, my sheets trying to strangle me. But I didn't wake up gasping with an arched back, or wide-eyed and sweat soaked.
No, I woke this morning to an overwhelming sense of control. My will gets stronger and is evolving.

Soon I'll be standing on cold gray sands, surrounded by crackling cold and cascading waves. I'll scream at the ocean with my breath fogging like crystals and she'll scream back at me, because we understand each other. All of those foaming breakers wear down my pain, they suck the seething salt from my belly and the low heaviness of my womb away. I'll lie in the cold damp grit, and all of the darkness will ebb out of me, pulsing with the tide.

I roll my hips when I walk again, and smile at dessicated leaves as I stomp my way through the concrete paths of this city. My face automatically curves towards the sun, exposing the line of my throat. My breast rises towards the beams of light like it would to stroking fingers.
I had forgotten this aspect of femininity. I can be soft and yielding, and the surrender in it makes me feel weightless.

Steven, don't lose heart.

Did I scare you little one?
Did my honesty bite and pinch?
Even though I have to look up so far at you you are still small like a child to me.
With your beauty and crystal eyes does no-one ever confront you with honesty?

Chafe under the yoke of your convictions, but don't expect me to share the weight of your burden.
Rattle the bars of your cage with those long-fingered hands, but don't expect me to set you free. Because my prison is just as hard and tight as yours, but less visible.

My precious one, how the hurt in your eyes mirrors mine. I wish I could lay my head on your chest and hear your heart beat to make sure it hasn't been too cracked or broken, and you can tell me mine is whole.

Maybe we can't be friends anymore. Because we can't lie to each other, or to ourselves as well as we could before.

Food for thought...

“Do you take pride in your hurt? Does it make you seem large and tragic? …Well, think about it. Maybe you’re playing a part on a great stage with only yourself as audience.”

— John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Crush, Crushing, Crushed.

And I try why? Biological imperative? Human Condition?

Pretty soon I'm going to saw through the bones of my skull, find the part that makes love and emotion, and just start slashing.

And now it's too late.

Be careful what you wish for, because it usually ends in tears.
I would prefer carnal savagery to this wounded thing I see before me. This thing I used to love...