hurricane

GASOLINE and DRIVE

but how big must a puddle grow

before it is considered a pond?

when does a pond become a lake?

i’m drowning,

but i insist that i’m dry.

insist i couldn’t die.

now every single day is overtime.

is extra credit.

is derealized.

i’m drowning but i

wring my clothes

and promise that i’m dry.

it’s good for the flowers, they say.

that’s very good.

In the chapel,

in a bedroom,

in an alley late at night.

Always facing an inflated

godlike

version of some guy.

But as a girl you do what you need to survive.

You open wider, take the body.

Thank your father, you’ve been naughty.

2 Hail Marys, 20 lashings.

“I’ve been sent to punish you for daring to exist.

You will never know a love as meaningful as this.”

I’ve memorized

the lines

since I was 10.

From the Bible,

from the playbook,

from the magazines for men.

If you should mess it up, you’ll start again.

But, still, they only want

the women

they condemn.

I think that I’d have too much fun in hell.

With the pagans

and the hedonists

and sapphics there as well.

Purgatory seems the better fit

I can’t stand waiting in the corner,

but I do love being hit.

There’s not a torture you can prescribe

that I wouldn’t find

a way to like.

Every single second I’m alive

I’m sharpening an axe I’d like to grind.

“I was sent to punish you

for the way I was designed.

You will never know a love

that you fear more than mine.”

I want you to know that I am hard at work. There were some restrictions I was under, for a lot longer than it seemed, but they are no longer in the way. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks.

I’m always writing aimlessly and lawlessly as you know. But “album mode” is a whole other arena and the games are just beginning. I am working on some of my favorite stuff I’ve ever conjured. Wild to think that it hasn’t even been 2 years since IICHLIWP! I know it feels like so much longer. It does to me too. But there were 2 years and 7 months between HFK and Manic and honestly I think it was worth it. The time I took. And the growth that got me from that album to the next.

Thank you for having the patience and the faith.

It will pay off in the long run.

This feels like my debut all over again, in some ways.

Your love and support have carried me through a time where I thought maybe I only had a few albums left in me, but I know now that there are so many more than I could have ever dreamed.

Anyways, I love you.

Down the rabbit hole I go 🕳️

“Leave your body, and go somewhere else.”

I became such a skilled dis-associator that I split in two. Peel myself straight down the middle like the plastic backing of a bandaid. Astral project into a timeline where I haven’t made whatever grave error in character judgement has landed me in my terrible predicament. I have been asked 100 times what the difference is between Halsey and Ashley and I have never answered honestly. The truth is that I built her, as a child, to protect the tender core that lies beneath. In a confusing chain of events, my maladaptive daydream became my full time reality. My armor can walk and talk and they look just like me. But you can’t hurt us anymore,

but they should really all know better,

than to take the fucking bait

that I’ve been dangling from this building

with my goosebumps in the cold.

I am nothing but a story for a man until I’m sold.

and he can tell it in the lobby, to the old men at the bar

they’ll all clink his cup

and make shit up.

to take it all too far,

they’ll tell a lie about the summer

where they “once had me alone”

and I’ll reside inside a sonnet.

I’m a picture in a phone.

I’ve aged beyond the angel they all saw inside me then.

a grotesque and fading memory

trapped underneath a pen.

Girl is a Gun as the biggest pop smash ever.