gutted

sticky stalagmites picked like fish bones
tissue pulled, blood drained,
discarded.

rounded membranes scraped,
wiped down and
tucked back in

your eyes in pictures
pluck heart and intestine,
i spin, m., first into you
the elastic length of guts roping around my waist
tight on each side like hands

then spinning away,
unravelling
guts on the floor, heart hanging by a sticky clot
you retract into the wall
sucking my innards to a place i cannot see

oh m.,
you will discard it, this i know,
but if, on the way to the bottom of the pail,
it grazes your skin

i will gladly go empty
i will gladly live
without.

quantify

very little reading or writing. some cooking, some socializing, some excercise. tons of work. tons of worrying, ruminating, replaying, analyzing, beginning and ending and repeating. lots of sweating. not enough sleeping.

heartbreak: heavy. crying: limited. deep sighs: frequently. eye rolls: constant. glorified memories: hourly.

friends: some. progress: some. money: none.

/

i am so angry that you are so content in your confusion. it's not to the point where i hate you but to where i want to hurt you and see results. you are shallow, bull headed, entirely self absorbed, immature, controlling, and severe. i didn't choose to love you, and if i could rewind the tape i'd pull myself away before it had the chance to develop.

this is harder than i'm allowing it to be. i don't want to admit anything. i wish you were easier. i wish you cared about how much i care. it's only getting worse and im worried about the nightmares.

sadly,

been here before. everything feels like shit and i just need to find my way out. right now the situation is inconclusive and so there is waiting and worrying and nail biting and when there is sleep, which there is rarely, bad dreams follow.

oh, i just don't know sometimes. i get frazzled and uncomfortable and lose my words and sensibility. am left with jumbled, crowded thoughts like walking through times square at five o'clock on a friday evening. what i want is not is not a possibility, and it is not a possibility because it does not exist. really, it doesn't. and it's strange to think that one day it might, due to potential and change and maybe a well needed miracle.

it's easier now then it's been before because of relative stability in other areas; friends, work, family, health are all positives and so it's a simple thing to remind myself that the world isn't falling apart.

but....


it does suck. and i am sad. and i will miss whatever was there, real and imagined.

everything and nothing

it rains through june. things are different but i am no different and this makes no sense, thrown into bad beleifs and comfortable beds and cunning arms and unwelcome mornings; i said no but i felt guilty so it happened and i felt torn apart and emptied out.


there is someone i love who does not, or will not, love me and this i am trying to overcome, push past, rise above. it's a slow pain, like warts pushing up through the skin and breaking surface. my mind tells me about irony and her sister misfortune, my minds tells me that the earth can only be unfair and that i will get what i want precisely when i stop wanting it. but i keep wanting.

i continue to shrink sizes, throwing out old pants that slide and settle below my belly, dresses whose sides balloon and no longer touch my sides. it is no good--i am guilt ridden for arbitrary purposes, for items i deem one day good and one day bad. it's a problem and maybe i don't care. maybe i just don't give a shit right now.

back to love..

i have to imagine that one day in the future i will forget about these days.

in which living feels pleasant and not excessive

nostalgia for the island where i grew up, longing for the quiet sense of urgency found along the train tracks of oakdale, inside the connetquot library near closing time, and on the cold winter shores of montaulk.

it is so unfair when wanting and wishing have no baring on the world around us; it is so inconceivably unfair that these things are gone for good.

wanting back a boy whom has all but disappeared from the radar, a forgotten ghost who may still be alive in body but is truly deceased in spirit.

i want a home with a basement and a back yard. i want the option of spending my days in one of several rooms, soft rug under my feet, a staircase that allows for dramatic exits, and a living room in which living feels pleasant and not excessive.

i want warm arms, clean sheets, curtains that pull together to block every last strand of light, easy wind, small garden, quiet dusk in summer.

i have been writing a lot about the quiet--not silence, this is different and assumes more pathology--most likely because the various voices in my life have started their slow fade.

i used to be so afraid of losing people that i would push them away first, giving myself the benefit of controlling the outcome before it happened spontaneously. "and what do we know about mentally ill people? that they always do better in situations where they are able to predict the outcomes. a direct quote from a clinician i work with.

now, i am better, but i have still retained some questionably borderline traits. i know this and i know that i've probably come as far as i'm going to go in that department. scrapping them permanently would mean uprooting my whole personality; digging through the whole haystack to seriously find one small needle.

my fear of losing people has boiled itself into a hearty dose of avoidance; walking away from things that hurt me. surely this isnt a new theory--the equivalent of singing "LA LA LA!" when someone else is talking.

all i can say is that it's working and i'm feeling better about certain situations. because i'm feeling nothing and nothing is better than a combination of any of the negative emotions i was feeling.

i have no insight to how this all will play out. all i have is wanting and wishing and here's hoping that life turns out like a murakami book.

to thine own self be true

a path is emerging, cleared by my goals and ambitions, and something unknown is hustling me towards it.

as an outsider i can see the paths of others with clarity and correlate their direction with the forces influencing them. i will tell you, with great sadness, the omnipotent force: money.

money in everything, even the suggestion of money, like the rounded shape of cupcakes underneath foil. fame, power, beauty: all these things suggest money and vice versa money suggests them as well. people i know covet these things, these subjective abstracts that can quickly and efficiently be converted into concrete $$$$ dollars and then measured. and then calculated into a net worth and that translated into a self-worth.

you will be the big person with little people underneath you. you will have trampled and clawed and torn your way to the top of your career ladder. you will stand next to the right people to stand next to, but never the wrong people. wrong people are like slime in the sewer and you will sneer at them. you will gather bits and pieces about us, and then you will learn about them, and you will eagerly perpetuate the mind blowing exclusivity that corporate enterprise jerks itself off to.

i feel like i am hallucinating or dissociating. i feel like the world around me is unreal, or at best a fragile facade. i feel like i am the only person who can tell the king has no clothes. i feel like i have seen a man crawling through hallucinogenic puddles and a man strapped all limbs tied down and mouth stuffed with cotton strapped to a bed a woman with a self inflicted gunshot wound to her stomach suicidal rage rape when she was five years old forgot how to speak her mother wouldn't believe her so she drank bleach and forgot how to speak. a man in the bathroom sees his own eyes a second later his brother is dead gunshot wound to the head his baby brother's in his arms with blood and brains pouring out on to both their shirts.

i feel like i have seen all this and you have seen: an expense report. a stack of memos re: conference with so-and-so company? several date books and a blinking light on the telephone.

and we don't and we won't understand each other. and not only are our paths diverging but they weren't one to begin with, no if your path was to the sky than mine was to the sea.

my life is going to be lonely for a while.

it's now the four year mark

Summer/2007

Dear. M:

We are quickly approaching the the two year mark, two years since we have spoken, two years since you've seen me. I have seen you--last Christmas, perhaps the one before I don't remember. I made out your shape in the dark as C. pulled around the bend where Karshick meets Locust. In the gas station window, I spread my eyes wide looking for you and then you were actually there, reclined with your legs kicked up at first. Then, almost as if you saw through the blackness of midnight, the glass door opened and you exited the small office.

I can't remember how I felt. Probably my heart was ready to lurch from my chest and grab hold of your throat. Probably C. didn't catch on to my explanation of why we should take an alternative route home (had I told her you were working @ the Sylvio Brothers station?) and so I watched you alone, silently.

Now it is summer. The quiet coldness has receded and yet I still dream of you every night. They are fantastic adventures that take to the sky, to the swarmy jungles of Africa, the crowded halls and cluttered lockers of Connetquot, the ins and outs of every place we've ever or never been.

You are with me all the time, and in this way, time has slowed and these two years seize to create a chasm between us.


it's only now that i can re-read these things without the ache returning. returning in full force, anyway.