repeated shock at my body's stubborn resilience rage at its inability to gracefully exit... to throw my soul a goddamned bone and let me get the fuck out of here.

what point is there in speaking of how the closest I've been to the ocean in five years is the saltwater rolling down my face?

(I shouldn't be ungrateful, then. I see the sea every day.)

what end will come of saying that a caged animal will bite? that a caged bird will stop singing? because will they, really? or will they be condemned — damned — to writing shitty poetry about their selfish pain?

my world is on an angle that worsens with every rain, and it's monsoon season. the eternal summer head radiates through the holes in the lid of my coffin. despite the season, there is no fire or warmth my water runs cold. my lifeblood is being drained twice over but only enough to tire, not kill. on the horizon is an echoing psalm, played by the orchestra of the past, but I have no new song to sing.

I do not wish to meet it. I do not want them to win. I do not want to sing any longer, my friend.

upon my own flesh, the brachium adorned with evidence that the thousand cuts occurred, but death never seemed to follow.

my body is the final marble column, cursed by the moon that refuses to bow wholly to the ravages of the ages my mind is the temple that was drowned, twenty seven centuries ago.

let me go, oh goddess, I beg you, let me go— let me enter the white river I've heard tell of (the magician of dreams called it a sea) have mercy; let me leave this place.

let me go to where there is no fear, no golden knights with whom I can never measure up, no thin ice to tread upon unknowingly, no explosions to tiptoe around flinchingly, no aching boredom in a room that suffocates, no lying awake in a cacophony when it rains, no pain born simply of trying to sleep, no more, no more, no more, oh no—

I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm so fucking tired, goddess, please will you not let me go?

if things will never change, can I not go? if nothing can be healed, why can't I leave? what can be gained by anyone from my staying: stultified, agonised beyond recognition, red-eyed and dead-souled?

what did I do to deserve eternal life?

to misquote Saint Frida, Our Lady of Pain Transmuted: I hoped the end was peaceful, and I hoped to never return.

I suppose I returned. eleven times returned.

love is not enough. I learned that the hard way. neither life nor death love me enough to embrace me.

whatever I did in the past damned me here to moth-eaten eternity.

if only I could shake you off like an unseen gossamer strand walked into by sheer accident caught by the impish wind and taken to elsewheres wild, free in lusty green springtime ripe to burst with laughter and love

oh, my darling even now, my only my if only

no parts of me do, not willingly when the memories come they appear like vomited blood a blister beneath skin so opaque that no veins show his swinging finger turns to a fish-hook and embeds itself into the memories, and I shatter like a fist-kissed mirror—

like a crack on the river-ice frozen too thin— someone else smiles, nods, professes relief someone else walks out of the clinic, head high but someone else yet runs to the public toilets locks herself inside a fetid stall and sobs heedlessly until she throws up.

the incident is not single.

but I will sharpen the knife and I will not stop. I will wield it again, and again, and again with the determination of a poet.

Will you not heed the summons of rising waters? Will you not seek the white sails of great ships awaiting? Does your heart not yearn still for the murmuring depths, For the towering waves where all distance is conquered?

waking up with “Snowing in Sapporo” playing in your head

nothing

this is my way of cushioning my soul against the fact that I know we're over. maybe we were just a star that burned out.

but the universe still hums around us. I still inhabit the body of the girl you called your best friend.

maybe we never had eternity. maybe we just had now. maybe now is over.

but if I step outside, I can still see stars. maybe somewhere in the wreckage of us, a flame still burns.

but all I am seems to be a wave of seawater. I crash in, then pull away. I douse the flame with my very nature.

nothing lasts forever, except maybes.

maybe, one day, you'll forgive me.

I will never know if the choice I made while balancing on the edge of a white powdered razorblade a pinpoint heel-turn that changed the whole world that shattered every last idle dream left and made the stars leave any possible sky was right.

the memories play back in watercolour. and I suppose, once, they were beautiful.