poems

Contents

Myth or Thought

Reality

My Cocktail

Ignored

Ruined

Still Lost

I Swear!

Body Aches

New Morning

Days

Bathroom Mirror

Untitled

What Waited at the Top

Ascension

Myth or Thought

My days are wearing off —

do I become a myth, or just a thought?

The nights go unremembered,

lost forever, out of my control.

Memories pass. They cease to be.

What’s left are short life spans,

lived only through the dark,

where we picture, we imagine,

a great, aspirational life —

then morning comes.

It just ends.

Reality

Afraid to see reality, I can’t tell what’s real,

alone all day too much time,

alcohol, hides the truth,

speed, holds my tears,

Klonopin, sadness in my eyes,

my life, death in the future.

My Cocktail

Amphetamine, alcohol,

my cocktail to make me me.

Insufflation, drinking,

hoping to feel free.

My world! My world —

heart finally pumping,

blood flowing, faster, faster,

away from any thoughts that chase me.

Ignored

My hands shake uncontrollably,

more and more violently.

The thoughts consume my body entirely.

Look away — they ignore my cries for help.

Turning to go opposite ways,

ignoring my agony I feel every day.

Ruined

All these thoughts, pointless —

a whirlwind of pain in my head.

The perfect night for a hopeful mind,

ruined by myself with drink and a line.

Still Lost

Up and down, loud and quiet,

cloudy and clear —

I’m still lost.

I Swear!

I won’t lie anymore.

I won’t sin anymore.

I will respect everyone.

I will put others first.

I will be a better man.

I will learn to love.

Then I woke up

Body Aches

Same shit

My own fault

Seven more months

Lost inside my skull

I won’t be anything

Ever.

New Morning

Awake energy

Start new!

Oh, I’m aged

Real dreams

Can’t come true

Life’s past due

Days

How long this time

Traumatized myself

In an apartment of smoke

Staying still

Being nothing new

Stuck this way

Since I remember

That first cut wrist at 7 years old

And here my calls for help

No one cares.

Still

Bathroom Mirror

Staring back at me

is the face of delusion—

scabbed and torn

from the poor judgments

of my younger years.

I try to wash it away,

down the drain,

away from my eyes,

so I don’t have to see.

But I scrub and scrub,

and still everything I hate

stares back at me.

I can’t get rid of

this putrid self I made—

the one living in the mirror,

the one I now despise.

So I avoid all mirrors.

Cameras too.

I never look—

so I never have to see

what I’ve become.

Everything I hate.

All I’ve become.

All I can’t take.

My torn, ruined body

thrown back into my eyes

every day.

Instead of trying to get myself back,

I accept the horror,

the delusion,

the sentence.

An ugly portrait—

a mangled face.

Everything I hate.

It can’t be changed.

I can’t change.

Untitled

Everybody hates me

I’ve treated everyone wrong

I’ve lied, cheated, stole, and murdered

everyone’s love like it was my own

Nobody needs me

so I think I’ll lay down and die

find every drug I can find

and fly to the other side

I dug my own grave

by being a shit fucking asshole

I hope when I die

I’m punished for my life

—

So I hope everyone I hurt

is happy when I’m gone

I’ll even write a letter from hell

describing the tortures I’ve earned

I hope it satisfies everyone

gives them so much joy

knowing I’m in the place

that was always inside my mind

—

Everybody hates me

but I won’t apologize

without my deceit and wrath

I never would have enjoyed my life

I accept my fate

living deep in sin

I’ve always known I’d do the time

and that is just alright

—

So when I take up residency

in the fiery hells

make sure to raise a glass

at the sound of my screams not getting out

Everybody hates me

I’ve treated everyone wrong

but I promise you I’ll be smiling

when you see me lowered in the ground

What Waited at the Top

Two things live at the top of these hidden stairs

and they have no correlation to one another.

The bench sits low, slates cracking, mossed with going unused,

built to hold hobbies that stopped coming.

Sturdy, its legs are still square. The boards feel level.

It screams in a place no one can hear, I am ready —

but nothing has come this climb in years,

since the humans who built it decided

it just wasn’t worth the climb anymore.

Growing green, it faces the water, almost thinking to itself.

It cannot flinch, it cannot look away.

It just stands, slowly morphing to the grass, in the correct position,

patient, as furniture is meant to be made,

which is to say, not patient at all, when your purpose is that of sitting and lay.

Now it’s just a reminder of waiting, hopeful that meaning will come its way.

Beside him, the tree — it does not wait. The tree remembers.

A trunk splits in torture, mimicking the inside of a broken mind,

done and torn intentionally,

a wound grown out and spread to show the world.

Bark stacked, showing years, water lines from drowning floods,

the same waters the bench is too low to have escaped.

The tree has watched the creek rise into his roots, destroying his ancestors’ deep veins,

just to chaotically pull back down to almost nothing,

so much longer than the bench has existed.

The tree doesn’t sit through weather. It becomes part of it.

Every ring inside it is a year of choice, not waiting,

standing exactly where, as a seedling, his roots said first.

So this is the top of these stairs, in the same space:

one thing that gave up gracefully,

built and made, but useless, because it will never become purpose again,

and the other, a thing that had not a choice to leave, just endures and grows and shows the world its scars,

turning itself into something of divine devotion.

I stood between a bench that quit, slowly molding into the surrounds,

and a tree whose growth and beauty never stops, never quits.

I don’t know which one I climbed up here to be.

Ascension

Amphetamine eyes trace the streets on this night,

Street lamps turning into moving beings staring at me under a canopy black as pitch.

Casting light in my path in a way only I will know or understand,

Grass, cement, dirt, the terrain means nothing in this maze,

Under my feet each step feels like it’s stuck in sand then propelled with wrath towards the sky.

Why wake and anchor myself from this journey?

My mind ascends, my thoughts drift to greater heights

past what the body was or could form to hold,

Flailing, my arms reach blindly, fiercely whiplashed away from my body,

Towards time, towards eternity.

Why wake? End such a beautiful trance?

My body has begun to navigate creation itself, goosebumps, burning and prickling into my skin,

And as my speed picks up past limits of light, my thoughts of endless racing blur together and no longer seem to matter, just disappear.

Colors, such splendid crimson, indigo, fusion of molten magenta and acid lime, explode into my eyes.

Permanently pigmenting my brain so fast, unable to remember the path to this nowhere I can’t name.

The universe keeps its secrets in beauty, unable to translate, but my mind’s thoughts are calm,

In perfect dance with time and space.

Why wake? Feel the heavy return from nowhere?

The voids in my head overflow with stimuli, noise in my brain starting to creep back in,

my ruminating thoughts entwined with the cosmos, warped reality,

Vision, hearing, organs pumping, electricity of the brain caught and balled like string.

Blinding my consciousness temporarily  by  romanticized recollections of me doing good.

And my grip on perfection begins to lose strength, a solitary microcosm,

Plummeting back to earth.

Maybe tomorrow will not come and on the way back I will crash and burn,

And I pray the awe of my fictional reality through time may persist through my dull pain,

Just want to keep that unspeakable frantic, chemically induced time slippage that went by in a blink of an eye.

I just call it happiness, but it always disappears for good,

The journey is never the same, unlike the daily routine of the grounding back to earth.

Slow dull…

Panic-induced rejection of ordinary life…

Why wake. Why wake at all.

THE NUMBERS

Thirty-six years of resolutions left undone. Four hundred thirty months of starting over, never once following through. Nineteen hundred weeks that never made it past day two. Thirteen thousand days I couldn’t escape. Nineteen million minutes wanting to rip my own spine out, bleed the DNA dry so nothing of this ever replicates again.

God, fuck you — I could never pass down what you cursed me with, out of the womb, a Sunday morning, 8:32.

Here I am running the numbers again. What I owe. Who I’ll never live up to. Whose face I’ll wear today, and one of these days the mask sticks and I stop existing and not one piece of the cosmos, not even earth, gets bothered by the news.

Heaven doesn’t care. It never has. Grew up strict Catholic, learned early that god just stands still while I beg, in tears, for relief from the curse he handed me at birth.

No reply. Never has been. Never will be. God’s just more fake news.

I keep asking why wake. He doesn’t answer anyone — let alone his own mistakes.

And still, somehow, I’m dressed by nine.

THE EMPTY SEAT

Maybe one day I’ll finally do it — take the long road down, find the one they exiled first for being different, sit across from him the way no one ever sat with me, and ask the question heaven never had the spine to answer.

He’ll laugh. Not cruel — just tired. Nobody answers here either, he’ll say. I asked the same thing on my way down. Silence was the first punishment. It’s been the only one since.

So I won’t stay in hell asking new gods old questions. I’ll cross the Styx myself, boatman be damned, climb every rung of every heaven they promised us as children, break the gate with my own hands if the hinges won’t give,

and find —

nothing. Not judgment. Not wrath. Not even absence dressed as mercy. Just a throne with the shape of someone who was never going to sit in it, a silence so total it swallows even echo, a big bang still expanding through a room that was empty before the first prayer ever left a human mouth.

And I’ll stand there — not angel, not demon, not son — just one more voice in the long line of everyone who ever climbed that high hoping the emptiness had a name.

It didn’t. It still doesn’t. And maybe that’s the answer: not silence as punishment, just silence because there was never anyone home to answer at all.

I’ll walk in like every ruined thing before me walked in — not asking to be saved, just asking to be seen by whatever built the architecture of this silence.

The throne is bigger up close. Marble worn smooth not by hands but by centuries of nobody sitting down. I run my palm along the armrest the way you’d touch a grave you weren’t sure was really empty.

I call out every name I was ever taught to fear — not to summon them, just to see if fear still works when there’s nothing left to be afraid of.

Nothing answers. Not the devil behind me, done laughing now, arms crossed, watching a mortal do what he never had the courage to finish himself. Not the angels, if there ever were angels, their wings just architecture too, gold leaf over an absence that was there before the gold.

I sit. Not because I’ve earned it. Because someone has to, because an empty throne is worse than a cruel god, because at least a tyrant would explain the terms, and this — this is just a shape where meaning was supposed to live and never moved in.

From here I can see all of it — every knee that ever bent toward this ceiling, every prayer that hit the vault and just came back down as weather, every kid on his own bedroom floor at 3 a.m. asking why wake to a silence that was never listening, because listening requires someone and there was never anyone in the room.

I don’t feel like a god. I feel like the last man standing in a house the owner never built, holding a key to a door that was never locked — because there was nothing on the other side worth keeping in.

So this is the secret they buried under scripture, under catechism, under every stained-glass window throwing colored light on empty pews:

there is no answer coming. There never was one. The universe didn’t withhold meaning from us — it simply never had any to give.

And somehow — that’s not the ending I expected. Because if no one’s coming, no one’s punishing me either. No one’s keeping score. No one carved unworthy into my name before I was born.

I made that part up. So did you. So did every voice that ever told us we were the mistake in a universe too empty to make mistakes at all.

I’m still sitting here. The seat’s still empty around me, but it doesn’t feel like a throne anymore.

It just feels like a place to finally put the weight down.