recovery,

to me,

is shouting into the void

and expecting an echo

to return.

i think

i am scared

of getting better.

i think

i have lost

my voice.

romantically,

i am stardust.

literally,

i am a cell, busted.

truthfully,

i am nothing but an

i am.

and if you can shout louder

into the void

than i can,

why am i even here?

my words do not make me special.

this is just chicken scratch

in legible handwriting,

dipped in black ink.

i am no more holy

than a whore-

my being is

no more exceptional

than yours.

i want to believe

i am special.

i want to revel

with the rest of the dreamers

in the stars.

but goddamn reality

always gets the best of me

and i can never forget

what we are.

we are nothing more than

flesh and bone-

everything else is just

pretend-

playing god

in dress-up games

and taking his shoes off

when the pastime's over.

i am no savior.

i can't fly

any more than a

skipping stone.

foolishly

i have let myself believe

that i am more than nothing-

i have denied my own

reality.

truthfully,

i am.

you are.

that's all we'll ever be.

all caps poetry can't even begin to describe the intensity of your words that night but as i sit in your favorite spot overlooking the city i can't help but get teary eyed over the memory of your hesitant hand in mine and the distant way you implied goodbye

maybe it wasn't my place to try

and make you stay

maybe we were always meant to fade away

god says he

has a plan for all of us.

i call bullshit on that motherfucker.

bullshit

because if fate

was the one who fucked up my head

and made melancholy my whore

that motherfucker should already be dead.

bullshit

because

who would spark a wildfire in their own backyard?

the answer lies in the burning of the good book:

no one owns the world.

there is no god.

there is no poetry.

this is not a sentence

and i would take the time to explain why,

but we're all dying.

nothing is what you think.

i would say

we are all made of stardust

but i don't want to make myself vomit.

if we are any part of the cosmos,

we are the detritus leftovers

that fall off of comets-

we are worthless.

i do believe

there's something bigger than all of us

but-

i'm well aware it might just be

the weight of the air we breathe.

i believe

that energy is conserved

that we are all made of matter

that gravity will be the death of me-

but there is no theory of everything.

i have been bleeding

for five years.

i walk around with

red hands

yet no one asks about my fingers.

i have carefully carried my guts

in mason jars,

only to spill them

on paper.

no one has helped me clean up

the mess i've made of myself.

so i will spell god with a lowercase g

and no one can stop me

because there is no saving grace.

i vow to shit on the bible.

I spelled my name out

in the sand,

and it looked

like another language,

like gibberish or

Sanskrit, and I remember

you said it tasted like

hieroglyphics

on your tongue,

but that might have just been

the wine

talking.

I rest my head on my pillow

but no where to rest my

soul, I go to bed too early

but I never sleep, one of the

many side effects

of you, and they go round and

round the rim of my skull like

headache

nausea

dizziness

insomnia

thoughts of suicide.

I can't consult my doctor

because his eyes

are your

kind of blue.

morning

Seattle

rain.

coffee and the burning of incense

my plant on the sill absorbing

the rain, wind, and album

while it rotates on the player

my dogs full

head full

all the decades lost and drained down

my feet bare against a throw rug that costs

more than my last car

and my blood tricked by health

my body snapping back into form

mind tricked by money

but today remembering the old days

the shit days

the days of running on fumes

in every sense of the phrase

an inch close to suicide without

even knowing it

the road and cities and sabotage

the faces and

the teeth in those faces

the rats inside of them

the roaches inside those

and the rotting insides

of them

but I sit here and drink coffee

Disintegration belting out from the

speakers

a nice contrast to Bad Brains

while I fed the dogs

and stretched

-yeah, no shit, stretched-

and watered the plant

which I’ve named Tom Araya

because when it was given to me

by some woman last year

it was just a stem and three leaves,

and it was thirsty

and shooting up from a

small, dark pot

and for some reason,

my mild synesthesia

placed a summer orange glow

around the

dark blue planter

and I heard Araya scream his

famous intro

on Angel Of Death

I’d never had a plant before him

and today Tom Araya is much taller

and living in a much bigger planter

15 or 16 leaves, his stem supported

by a bamboo splint

and next to his trunk in the soil

a new part of him is shooting up

in three stems from his badass

origin.

I sit here and listen to the rain

the album

the burning of scent

and time

and maybe wonder

but that’s what age

must put between us and

the world

and it’s what we use

to keep feeling like there’s

a fight to win

but I think about my plant

both of us abandoned by whores

after birth

both of us rescued by

soft hearts

and grown

from those hearts with

the best that they knew

and even though

I let time and populace

and myself break me down

from soil to trash to nearly saying

fuck it

I held on through words

which became my own soil

and I became their synesthesia

a slave to the source

to that place, the core that

has never stopped burning

toward a sky that we will

never know

regardless of how much

we praise it and mystify it

and give ourselves over

sitting here in Seattle

the rain tapers off

and I glance at Tom Araya:

I’ll keep getting richer

and you keep

getting

prettier.

I was hanging by a thread to heaven's gate

Until my angel untied me

Cutting off my fingers as I held desperately to the ledge

A test

To see if I would sprout wings and soar

But I was too focused on the red that now tainted him

A mark of betrayal from the one who promised to protect me

To save me from this wretchedness

So I hit the ground

Sinking through the earth

Finding myself

In the deepest pits of hell

Staring at my angel

Who was waiting for me

To set myself free

With no rope or ladder

An impossible goal to achieve

Stop looking at me

With those pitied eyes

Answer my prayers

And help me to fly