Not mine.

Wallowing in grief that isn't mine.

I pick handfuls of diamonds and mud up, to feel them slide through my hair.

Someone else's tears and sorrow adorn my cloak and crown.

Heroes don't take mud-baths.

It drips, draining me of sense and absolving me of all my sins.

Muck that fills my lungs and falls from the corners of my mouth, 

Like blood.

Clotted blood, and this smell of iron and thick death.

I pick my teeth with its ribs.

Tiny sticks to bury, nothing more.

I grieve things that aren't mine to grieve.

I'll vomit up someone else's tragedy, hang it loosely from the rafters

Like some macrame lace.  

Puke lace.

If I hold it all in my hands again, clotted mud and sticks

If I grind it in my matted hair

Wipe it through my stinging eyes, and press it in my fragile skin, 

Will it go away, then?

Will the smell go away?

I want to snip my skin into ribbons.

I want the sky to breathe me in, 

My house should be wider than the desert...  This isn't mine.

This isn't mine.

Snip snip

 

I want to snip my skin into ribbons.

I want to feed on bones

I want the air to become me

My house should be wider than the desert.

Dreams and shifting sands of sleep

Weigh heavy on my eyes and weeping shoulder wounds.

Sand, and flesh and bones and skin

Ribs for toothpicks,

Dreams for babies 

And children

And crones.

I want to snip the air into the thousand crumbling salts it falls in

I want their ribbons in my hair

Bone ribbons

Salt ribbons

Flesh ribbons winding through us all

I want dreams that aren’t sticky

I want to breathe unsalty air

I want a home that I fit in.

I want.  I always want.

See-through

Want out, yet?

Did you find it- what you were looking for?

I found a drifting isolation, tonight

Found the validation I was hoping to find

And some comfort, too.

I’ll fake it in any way I can get it- you should try it sometime. 

It feels like love, most of the time.

Promised I woudnt have any more conversations

With ghosts.

The thing about ghosts is: 

Most times, they never really even showed up in the first place.

I know you’re here, some kinda specter, too.

Not a creep: that implies disgust, on my part.

No, you’re here out of a wraith’s confusion

Hoping to find some sliver of connection

Wandering the open sky looking to find

Some ounce of the way I used to make you feel;

Home.

Worthwhile.

Listened to.

Important.

Wanted…

Fact is: 

I was always just a ghost, myself.

You just never bothered to see through me

At all.

All. Fall. Down. Again.

 Eats away.

Pain eats at everything. 

I used to say pain was clarifying, but - you scrape it out of its shell, throw it in a blender with trauma and exhaustion and I'd ask if any of you to describe it as 'clarifying' the same.  Sure, some kind of toxic positivity bullshit might tell you to think otherwise, but - I haven't found any of that useful.

If I could think myself out of this shithole, I would have by now.

Could you, given the same set of circumstances

Come up with a different solution?

Are you really so strong as you think?

Given absence, given shame, given humiliation or boredom or isolation...

I would offer that you would be just as weak.

Just as prone to reach for the nearest source of comfort.

I have to remove the circumstances.

This isn't about me being stronger, this is about me accepting my particular set of strengths and weaknesses and the things that make me who I am.

And finding better things to do with them.

I am not the problem.

My unique set of memories makes me especially sensitive and vulnerable to this unique experience.  

I can't change the memories.  I have to change the experience.  I can change, I can change- I'm not the same?

It comes in waves.

Grief, I mean.  And growth.

It comes in waves.

Waves of overwhelmed-ness,

Of peace and understanding.

Of connection, or some isolation.

We isolate, we all do.  We carry our burdens alone;

She did

We never learned how to talk to one another,

Or really: how to trust one another.

I wish I could build a boat to keep us all afloat.

But, I guess then we’d never really learn how to swim.

This year, for me, has been about learning to swim.

I’ve been just-barely-not-drowning for so very long.

Had to jump out across the ocean to find a new place to start.

I’m still really just starting.  Finding my way 

Through the waves.

All Fall Down.

 I walked the whole labyrinth, 

Laid my skin and soul bare and left it drying, met a 

Minotaur of my own making.  

I fought him with fists and furious excuses.  

He thought me a mess, a spurious muse.

We ended up making friends and playing some spite-less game of chess 

by the sea.  

My monster, and me. 

 

He schooled me with a sneaky rook or two, but I hooked him in the end.  

I heard from the son of a shopkeeper 

That the son of the sun was horsing around- 

Drove his carriage right into the ground

Left his sister crying

Her tears turning to sweet amber

We all fall down, you see.

The sun and the moon and me,

We all 

Fall 

Down.

You would be, too.

I have escaped, tonight.
Into some foxhole of comfort, walls as thin as paper but somehow 
I'll take it.
I'll take anything fucking anything that doesn't feel like that.

Meditate?
You meditate, motherfucker we are so far gone beyond meditating when all of the wall have eyes and you can smell blood with your fingers and you dream waking dreams of glass and mud and tiny saw-teeth grins and bandages...
You meditate.

I can't be in my skin, anymore, man.
My soul hurts.

My body has been telling me, shouting at me, screaming at me all day:

FUCKING LEAVE.

Only, I can't.
None of us can, that isn't an option so where else do I go?
I've a body committing mutiny, a mind trapped in a faraway place and I'll go anywhere but here.
So, we got another earthquake.
Another tide to ride out
Figure it out. Back me into a corner, got windows to my left and a bottle to my right, I'll take the bottle sir.  This is why I'm drunk.  It's just easier, and: given the same memories, you'd be fucking drunk, too.

Tell me you wouldn't be drunk, too.