For What I Have Done And Have Failed To Do

These are the mountains I want to drive my car off of and don’t visit anymore.

This is the bed I want to never wake up in and hope I don’t wake again.

That’s the smile burned into the back of my eyelids and aren’t responsible for anymore.

There’s the woman I’ll never stop feeling the weight of and won’t hold anymore.

In public you count the people. There are eighty four people here tonight seven more people have shown up since you first counted. You’ve checked five times and each time none of them are you. This is good and this is bad.

Your heart gets confused can’t remember if it’s the size of a fist or a small car.

It feels like a ton it feels like a grudge it pumps blood it sings whale songs and wonders alone.

Your head can’t stop making bus routes and laying train tracks.

This is how you could be here this is how you get to me just open your mouth.

Anxiety comes in the form of an Earthquake tonight there’s too many people and they all weigh too much.

Return to your car recline the seats stare at the ceiling and for the first time feel crowded in your car. Choke back your heavy breath beat down your speeding heart and go home

collapse on your bed cry and realize you’ll pray to a pill over a god any day.

10.14.16 - “Cutting the Chord” One from the earlier months. My hand has healed since then.

(reposted by request. cheers.)

  14 Lines From Love Letters Or Suicide Notes.

1. Don’t freak out.

2. We both know this has been coming for a long time.

3. I have been staying awake at nights, wondering if I should tell you.

4. I bought the kind of crackers you like. They are in the hall cupboard.

5. Now that we have watched all the episodes of True Blood, I do not know what else to do next.

6. I have just been too afraid for too long.

7. This is the kind of thing where waiting for the time to be right would just mean waiting forever; it’s the kind of thing no one else can help you decide.

8. I came home on Thursday and found all of the chairs in the house stacked in a pile in the center of my kitchen; I don’t know how long they have been like that, but it must have been me that did it. It is the kind of thing a ghost might do, to prove to the living he is still there. I am haunting my own apartment.

9. My grandmother was still alive when I was five years old and she told me to check if the iron was hot enough yet, so I pressed my hand against it, and it was red and screaming for hours. Twenty five years later she would still sometimes apologize, in the middle of conversations, I feel so bad about making you touch the iron, she would say, as though it had just happened. I cannot imagine how we forgive ourselves for all of the things we didn’t say until it was too late. But how else do you tell if something is hot but to touch it?

10. I imagine my furniture in your apartment.  

11. I wonder how many likes it will get on facebook.

12. My dad always used to tell the same joke, but I can’t remember the punch line.

13. I was eight years old and it took three weeks (three eight year old weeks— imagine) to gather everything I needed to be Batman. Rope, boomerangs, a mardi gras mask with the beads cut off. I couldn’t find a cave near my house, so I buried them all in a bundle under the ivy. For years after,

I tried to find that spot again.

          The ivy grew too fast.

              I searched in so many spots

it seemed impossible I had missed any.

But I never found it.

How can something be there

       and then just not be there?

         How do we forgive ourselves

             for all the things we did not become?