I wonder how I could possibly open my mouth wide enough to let this great oil slick of fear ooze out, a dark gleaming bubble of oh, the world, I wish, oh please, I cannot read the news one more time today, let me wallow in my knowing that I am lucky enough to read the news, to read and not to be the news, to not be the bad news that goes unreported. and who am I to go on writing all my violent love songs, who am I to ask for money and for help, get steadily drunk alone in my living room, write lines of code and trace out shapes of old longings–

I get it, I get it. 

sometimes I think perhaps I owe it to the world, for all its kindnesses to me, to grow out of this maudlin disposition. to discard some malfunctioning part of my heart, the part that makes reasonable emotional responses and extensive political involvement and healthy amounts of sleep or romance impossible. 

but sometimes I think I owe it to the world to know that dredging my ripped-up heart up all over the place is maybe the one thing I can offer in exchange for all the meals and movie tickets and late night poems and long car rides and undeserved forgivenesses.

all I can ever do is keep on living through these big waves of emotion that scrape me along the rocks, the options are that, or to become one kind of rock or another. I cannot become obsessed with my own stupid guilt, we all know that that’s no cure for narcissism. 

I started out trying to say something, I think, but I had to pull a drunk curtain down on all the pain I see around tonight. Happiness does not come easy. 

what was it that Justin sang, so quiet, so beautiful? this is the world, where beautiful things and terrible things will happen. 

some attempts at candor, because the thrilling fear of accidentally revealing myself to my subject matter is the only thing that really gets me thinking clearly.

things I like:

- that you probably know exactly what I mean by that first sentence.

things I don’t like:

- how obvious it is to me, and likely to others as well, how quickly my writing style shifts around to suit itself to whoever I’m fucking or reading or reading and fucking

(I just want someone to put their words in me through every means of ingress and then I pull the ribbon from my mouth like a magician’s trick, other people’s cadences pigmented with my blood).

I like: how you like to cum twice.

If wishes were horses, we’d have to steal hay, solely based on how often I think about leaning my head on your shoulder, or the way you pull my arms around you.

I don’t like: how I keep wanting a word for this, how I know it’s true about me that if you’d call me your girl then I’d care even less about unanswered messages or other women or long stretches of divergent time, how a certain kind of purely symbolic validation matters more to me than, I don’t know, a bunch of shit that quote unquote normal reasonable adults seem to care about. Fuck whoever you want forever but let’s get matching tattoos and make everyone we know worry about us just a little bit. 

I want to tell you all my dirty secrets–all the smoke-singed motels and suburban den couches and vacation city alleyways, all the times I saw stars, and that time that things went so, so bad, and that other time, and that other other time, and reading aloud from a cookbook in a tongue I don’t speak and fucking on a white couch above the frozen lake, and my terrible fear of french girls, and how I am this endless stream of wanting, a desiring machine, and how afraid I am to die and how hard it is to be alive, and how that somehow makes me want to kiss you harder.

I like the way you look me right in the eyes. I like how you hold my hand. I like your clever jokes and your kindness and your alcoholism and your overly romantic sensibilities. I like the way you make me want to work harder to be happy, make me want to stay in bed all day, make me want to jump out of it and make a thousand beautiful weird things. So I guess I like the way you make me feel the things I’m always feeling, but somehow happier. 

from an old notebook recently found, undated.

I sound like such a little girl. I suppose that’s what I was. We were all children, once, and we all made a child’s mistakes, responded with a child’s petulance and deflections. I feel differently about some of these things now, some the same.

Mostly it’s just so strange to find myself visiting my past self like a foreign country, a language I’d almost utterly forgotten. Time, time, time. There is always some new heartbreak to turn our lashes to. My memory is poor and life is so long. I am trying to be better at only being a part of kindness on all sides, but I sometimes find it counter to my inclinations. 

—-

It’s cold. He makes me so angry. I recent myself for having accepted poor treatment for so long–even convinced myself I deserved it. I didn’t. I’m disappointed in myself, in him, furious at him, furious at myself for ceding my time, my energy. Where’s my cardigan?

I’m broke, scared I’ll end up like my parents, trapped by money, my lack of it and my laziness, carelessness in managing my finances toward my artistic goals being accommodated pursued to their fullest.

all that money spent on beers I only sort of wanted, time spent in bars I should have spent working or asleep, and I really would have rather been doing those for some of that time and knew it. I feel like I’ve been fucking up. All those applications never finished, or shoddily submitted, all those drafts unwritten, all those rehearsals and meetings I was unprepared for. I let myself blame my job, but what about all those hours I do control? so much time is getting wasted in drama and drinking. and when it’s not my own, it’s others’! I say I’m tired all the time–I could go to sleep before 2am some more nights. My excuses are bullshit. 

[—-], not a productive presence in my life, because he is not to be trusted. He just wants whatever ammunition he can find. He is loyal to no one– not to him, not to her. He is a shark, don’t take anything he says at face value.  Everyone has their reasons to lie to everyone else, and they do.

several blank pages later:

She is blowing on her fingernails. He takes her hand, and presses down on each fingernail. (Slowly, firmly, deliberately.) His eyes move between her nails (painted) and her face (her eyes on him). It is completely silent. As he moves to her second hand, we hear the sound of water running, of dishes clattering in a sink. Two men sitting on the floor take the lid off a cookie jar and slowly eat cookies. They pass a single glass of milk between them. 

anxiety dreams.

Amanda and I have just moved into a new place, the top floor of a huge beautiful old building, it’s in a weird part of town but I’ve never had so much space and that’s thrilling. We finish moving in at 10pm on a Friday night, and are waffling as to whether that’s too late to invite everyone over for a housewarming. I’m being especially indecisive, and seeing that behavior in myself irritates me.

You answer my text from earlier in the day and say: hey, sid, it’s been fun, you’re rad and we’ve had a great run of it, but icymi I’m moving to New York in the morning.

I ask why, attempting to sound calm, and you respond: there’s this girl there who makes me feel like I’m on fire. 

I ask if I can see you tonight before you go, and run out of the house to meet you in a bar I’ve never been to before. At first I can’t find you, and run into Andres, who wants to roll my cigarettes even though he doesn’t smoke. I find you, and we are about to head outside for cigarettes and talking, and as I get my things I think about what I could possibly say:

I am completely and utterly in love with you, and the only demand I want to make of you is that you be here with me, that you not suddenly disappear, that your presence in my life continues to bring me joy and confirm that you too really and truly give a shit. 

I wake up before I hit the door, my Saturday morning hangover creeping over me, rubbing regret against my temples. I want to get back to sleep to know what happens.

I want to know what look happens to your face when I tell you exactly all the dumb romantic shit you make me feel, how I want to sell everything I own and live in a van with you, how I want to get drunk with you forever, how all the emotions I have about you make me want to have weirder and weirder sex, how you make me want to write a hundred books and learn how to give a tattoo in someone’s living room. 

I do not get to say these things, or see your reaction. I go back to sleep and am rushing to get to a performance venue, where I am underprepared for an elaborate routine. I am running late and take a cab, but as we approach the venue (a gigantic school), he starts asking me questions and speeds past our destination. He locks the doors, he is going to kidnap and rape me, but I somehow get my door unlocked and open while we fly down a busy street. I jump out, onto the dirty grass on the side of the road. He swerves to try and hit me, repeatedly, but eventually gives up. I get his license plate–some strange vanity plate that’s a pun on Jordan Almonds–and as night falls I walk back to the school, calling 911. 

The man on the line at 911 doesn’t believe me, or doesn’t care, and refuses to send any police officers to me, or medical staff to see if I’m okay after my jump from a fast-moving vehicle. I give up, and navigate through a massive crowd of children leaving the school and adults entering it, and finally get backstage.

It’s extremely dark, and Cassandra and Josh are waiting there for me. I realize I have forgotten all my props, in addition to not quite knowing the plan, which involves fake, black-light-glowing milk coming from my breasts in some kind of Madonna (Ciccone) and Child type deal in the midst of an elaborate dance number. I am freaked out and devastated and bleeding, but I start looking around for what we have to work with to make this show go on.

we all know it’s gauche to quote yourself, but I meant it when I said it and each time I sing the words or think them to myself: my loneliness has nothing to do with you. 

whatever I’m crying about, the politics and the men and the money and the aching body and the list of tasks I can never get on top of, it’s a symptom, not a cause. 

this sickness in my chest, in my head, in the pit of my stomach, it needs something to crawl out of. it needs a shape to whittle into something sharp to twist into my body. the hideous beast that I am needs carrion to worry.

to pretend like this pain I am so often in is about something is to pretend like there is still something rational left in me. to externalize this self-indulgent suffering is to give my foolish self some respite from the feeling that this is all my fault, that I could just somehow stop.

all this selfish language pours out of me and I feel a deep shame. 

please, please take care of me. please hear this keening sound and help it find a melody. please hold me in the dark and forgive me my trespasses. please make me get my shit together, please make me get help, please make me stop this. 

I fall in love with every spark of positivity and fall apart when it falls flat. I grasp at straws and weep at the splinters they give me. I am an idiot and time falls in on itself over and over and over again. 

every mistake I’ve ever made makes me want to send four a.m. sexts to occupied acquaintances. every thing I can’t remember makes me assume a horrifying action. 

I am not a human being, I’m a pile of organs with an iphone and a pack of cigarettes. I’m a breath-hitch on an old recording. I’m a poor recollection and a half-assembled collection. A bloodstain on your alleyway couch. A partial object and a full-blame shitshow.

This list could go on forever, but it won’t buy your groceries or call your mother or remind you to participate in your communities and your friendships. I spit blood in parking lots and it leaves no mark. Every gesture I have ever made has been a cry for help and it’s too fucking loud in here for my bullshit. 

I think maybe we are both going completely insane. 

You’ve ruined me for everything but wanting you, all throwing rocks at the windows of my thoughts and falling down laughing in the middle of the Saturday night Milwaukee Avenue traffic of my heart.

My standards for excitement have exploded and there’s shrapnel in my shoulders for you, baby. I hope you like this look, this one where I’m all bloody and earnest and 100% totally fucking wild about you all the time. 

I’ve spent my whole life feeling crazy for a mottled litany of reasons and unreasons, felt my hinges bend and break and mend and break again a thousand times. I am no stranger to strange nights and uncontrollable thoughts, but these, this beast is a new breed. 

My veins are full of neon. My teeth are made of loving knives. I want to trace your lines with every part of my body, even the parts I do not have. Especially the parts I do not have. 

I look in the mirror and feel surprised not to see tiny shafts of light pouring out of me in all directions, beer can reflections and wicked eye glints and a lighter flicking on in the dark. 

I’m a rock n roll marquee all jumbled up anew to spell out valentines for you. I’m a grinning girl and a wicked dad and a night of free beers and a sky full of streetlights and stars. I’m everything, everything, anything, yours, everything. 

notebook, 9/17/14:

I am suddenly very aware of the fact
that the fact of anything happening
that might make you sad
makes me want to do something, 

like burn entire cities down, wipe the memories of millions, colonize new planets, carve new worlds out of ice or stone, make a place where you aren’t ever aching with that deep, bad ache of real awful news, that deep, bad ache that we both know. I want to make you bleed from a thousand little cuts so that nothing can ever gouge you, nothing can punch through all the way to bone. 

Or everything can stay fucked up and terrible, but please let me hold you.
I want to lick each other’s wounds a while. 

Climb into a bed like a treehouse, fortify these bodies that we so like to bruise, these hearts we batter worse. Drag our animal saliva on the knee scrapes of our egos until we’re ready, for more devastating glances unexpectedly lashing us, more butterfly bandages over cuts the size of hours.

I want to learn new songs from the bees buzzing in your chest, show you how I take apart my bones to keep them from breaking when I travel or when I sit too still. The ringing in my ears could be retuned. You could hold my hand while I am sleeping. We could shimmy down to earth, and whoever has the broken foot that day can lean.

Every year, I have anxiety dreams.

Their content varies hugely. This year it was a glowering David Bowie disappointed in me for messing something up in our collaborative gallery show, and a panicked realization that it was Halloween, children were knocking on my door, and I had no candy and no costumes. In years past it has been zombie apocalypses, fights with my mother, horrific murder sprees, failed schoolwork. 

The waking varies too.

Previous years: Alone, in a panic, bolt upright in the 5am dark. In the afternoon sweat beside a poor decision. Stumbling my way to some school or work or meeting, only realizing hours later what the date was. 

This year, I found myself woken before my alarm, curled up around in a body full of warm blood and kindness, our skin covered in sunlight and cum and our foolish tattoos. I felt that silky kind of comfort, content to shift quietly from one position to another, finding different ways of fitting mostly-sleeping skins together until the day called us up out of bed. So why the stressful dreams? If I felt more relaxed than I had in … weeks, really, why was I a textbook case of nerves throughout the little movies in my head? 

And like I do every year, I eventually remembered the date. 

And so I imagine it will always be until I no longer know what time is: the early morning of September 11th gives me bad dreams. And yet I can at least hope that each year’s waking is as sweet. 

good thing I’ve found a new boy to feel obsessed with, because I’ve lost a couple with the closing of summer and I’ve got a chapbook to finish. and despite all my grandiose articulations, my claims of ceaseless aesthetic commitment, everybody knows that nothing gets me more prolific than the thought of my cheek against a chest tattoo, my tongue pushing against crooked teeth. These are some recurring themes, along with bad habits and good songs and the kind of hearts that push and pulse and stay up until dawn reading poetry. 

I guess all I’m ever doing is drawing out a map of the ever-sinking ever-rising bubble of blood in my chest–I lust, I weep, I sing, I sleep, I want I want I want I try–and its fear, its fascination with its own collapse, all its sticky little tendrils seeking out a world to hold. 

But imagine: if every time I wrote something, it meant someone I want to put my hands all over sitting across from me at the bar, reading, spilling his beer with excitement while I turn into a giant grin and two bitten, smiling lips. 

something hard and plastic was banging loud against the bathroom stall and her lips were girl soft, you know that soft soft and with just those slightest girl hairs above her lips and she tasted like someone else’s younger girlfriend and later there was anger and awkwardness and there was standing in the lake up to our knees and there was her body against mine on the southbound el and there was the strange morning when I walked away and realized the game was done and I never gave back her t-shirt but let me tell you there is a special magic in two girls whispering secrets in a bathroom stall.