This is the truth
Clawing, pushing, cawing
Shredding up the tender bits
Of my lying mouth
We keep them penned separately
(The lies)
They have no faces and
They are quite pleasant.
Breeze on the hillside
And I vomit forth truth like a fountain
Like graduation night ‘99
All rotten with pain and barbed
With I’m sorrys
It’s back. It caught up. I knew it would and I deserve that picture on the wall n o t y o u I have suffered I have cried died for that picture on the wall. Went for a walk tonight and was scared of a man in the shadows with his shuffling step. Pulled out a phone and faked a conversation I wish I’d had. Got stuck on the intersection and bled bled bled. I want to be strong like a wall. Threw a half-eaten sour apple at the wall. Scared in my chest. Hurt my back, crunch crunch. Cat eats the pieces. Hold the wall. Voices outside, inside, I’m on the side of the street with no lights on. Struggle to understand, to truthfully eavesdrop and let drop let fall emotions sweet on me gentle on me go gentle on me I’ve never once felt what I cannot see. Like a closed book and an aching stomach. Weight behind the eyes. I rap off in my mind while my eyes lose focus and the rash growwwwwws.
Don’t bite your tongue off. Damp the scared. Push it aside. A viscous confusion and hurt feelings. Your face all fuzzed. I wish I was a pond scene but I can’t conceptualize myself in landscapes. I am jerkymovingspiderskissme. Hurt all over but am I just bitter? I meant I met you, metalmouth. Hold me up or down all around scraping at the paint and licking the floorboards. Stingray stripclub sleep sleep sleep.
I’m sitting in the airport waiting to go back to Seattle after a long absence and some legal troubles. Tonight I’ll see my roommate again, hug my cat again, be near my Seatown friends and sleep in my own bed.
That should feel great.
It doesn’t.
While I was away I developed an anxiety disorder that makes driving for half an hour a terrifying ordeal. Imagine a two-hour flight like that. No, don’t. It’s better if you don’t. The anxiety also makes it hard for me to trust people, to identify my friends who I haven’t seen in a month or so as the same people they were when I left and to know that they’re not out to hurt me. I can do it, logically (because they’re amazing people), but it takes a lot of time and conscious relaxation. Sometimes more than I can muster.
My grandfather also died. He was the only human being I felt very, very similar to and now I’m adrift and lonely. I cry a lot. I’m a different person than I was when I left. In many ways, a weaker one.
I recognize my new kind, the quiet strength it took to get me through customs and into this seat.
I hope it lasts.
this is scary and raw and new and i don’t want to hurt it or you
this is not romantic and it’s not supposed to be but i know people assume
i’m terrible at friendship
Three hours ago I was drunk and high and ready to sleep til noon. Now I’m shaking through a comedown that has my stomach boiling and my body twitching. I know I put a broad assortment of chemicals in my body last night. I want to be able to do that without the chemicals that are already there going on the riot trail.
Today I watched a spiny dogfish die.
It lay on the sand of the beach in the surf and flipped itself from side to side, gills opening over and over, eyes going dull and glossy at the same time and flashing blue opal sick alien lights.
An adolescent gull was picking at its eyes and I kicked the gull away because no, because fuck you, because fuck suffering and fuck this tiny baby shark who is dying and I don’t know why.
The gull left and the shark flopped across my boots and the surf picked it up like I was going to and pulled it into deeper water. Its ballast was wrong, though, and it was slow and sluggish and it listed to the side and every wave carried it back onto the sand.
I wanted to crush its head in. I tried to stop the gull again and again and then I just didn’t. I just turned around and walked away.
And now I feel it everywhere. Behind my knees, in my jaw, my neck. That fucking flip-spine of the dogfish and if only I could have it in a jar, somewhere, safe compartmentalized, dead and still and not fucking flipping I could be fine. Fine. Fine.
With every heave of my stomach I feel like its going to come pouring out brackish from my mouth.
Don’t you sometimes feel like an old man?
Like you’ll lie on your back and you can feel the weight of your beer gut, and the hedge maze of hair springing up on your chest, and your penis lying flaccid on your thigh?
I wear glasses and I think it must be something like that.
Two nights ago I dreamt that my sister loved the devil. The townsfolk fear and tormented her and eventually she died from their cruelty. Three years after her death, the devil came to me. I threw sharp stones at him and told him to get away, leave from this place. He contested that it wasn’t him that killed her, anyway, and eventually I agreed. It hadn’t been. He kissed me on the cheek upon leaving and I realized what I had secretly known all along— I was also in love with the devil. I returned to the townsfolk to condemn them, to change them, and they turned on me as well. I was an archer, but my sister had been an artist. They had melted down all of her pastels into a prismatic boiling wax. When I went on my knees before the people, proclaiming her innocence, they declared me a witch and dumped it on me. As I was dying I reached out to them in a last gesture of supplication. I remember having no feeling in body except in my right arm, and then that too disappearing.
Last night I remembered what it was like to want to hurt someone, to want to kill them. I was afraid and then it stopped. I drank red wine in a cemetery and told the truth and jumped like a cat. What was supposed to make me sleep kept me up until dawn. I sloughed fear.
Tonight I played tell-and-tell-not which feels silly, because telling is always the way to go. We made spicy and wonderful soup and got drunk in the same graveyard. I found FRANCIS BOGGS 1904 and think it might be a nice investment to keep his grave clean. Tarot to clear my head seemed a good idea but was not done. Promises were made. I made also music in my head but not out and remembered that I need a new banjo.
I will sleep well tonight.
I’m afraid of the fog.
Last night, after long hours crying and in pain, I slept. I dreamt my love was a goblin princecking. He tried to woo me with wiles and glamour and I just laughed— I was a sorceress, after all, and just as powerful as he. So, one night, he cast upon me a spell of deepest slumber, and I slept without waking. I slept for seven days and seven nights, and made my witch-friends worry and my mother cry because I would not stir. On the seventh night, he came to my room and stole from my mouth a tooth— by no coincidence the very tooth in which my soul was hid. In dreams I travelled with him through many worlds and many nights, and eventually became so weary that I thought I would die. Knowing my pain, my mother finally went to the goblin king and the two made a bargain. I would wake rested and renewed from my slumber so long as I should marry him on the moment of my waking. My mother, exhausted and fearing for my life, agreed. Although outside of dreams I would have been none too excited about this agreement, in the dreams I’d travelled with him it became apparent to me that he was tired, and lonely, and kind, and I’d slowly come to care for and finally love him. Our union was dark and splendid and we lived happily all our days.
When I awoke in my bed in Seattle, it was foggy. So foggy you couldn’t see across the street. I’ve spent all day in it, and all night in it, and although I’ve tried to avoid going outside it happens, sometimes. So finally tonight I decided I’d stand on the balcony and talk to it. Reason with it. Reach out to the Eldritch horrors within, or something equally silly. I went outside in pyjamas and bare feet, clutching my familiar-cat to my chest. He howled once at being outside, then mewed, then was quiet. I stood out there, feet cold and sore, arms accumulating dew, for what felt like an hour. I went back inside and shut the door behind us and my cat started to howl again. I carried him around for a while and sang a lullaby. Finally he slept. Now he’s lying on my legs and I’m in my bed safe but I ache and I burn and I cannot sleep. It comes in the open window. It lines my throat.
I’m afraid of the fog.
It’s easy enough to do. But the consequences are interesting. Here is what I did today.
These were my thought processes (they are confusing)
