friend, i am i am
disaster-phile

silver tongues, golden whips, crystal winds
old hands, old voices.

“i don’t understand, or…i think that i might.

the rot is always there, malforming, mangling, pushing teeth through cheeks and churning them down my throat.
but is that what THIS is?

a lack of warmth and a desperation for stars, an infliction twisting up my thickening blood.
i attach, leach, my swirl of incisors clattering for the vein. i attach, and it’s a stirring of briar roses ripping my good sense to a pulp – a bloody enmeshment that i can’t reason my way free of.

‘selfishness’, to believe that i ‘like’, when i only like what i can take.
i don’t know how to ‘like’ someone.
what ‘like’ actually means, or how it should feel.
i only like what i can take, what i can steal.
so then, friend, am i real?
i don’t feel real.
i don’t ‘feel’, i consume
a maggot on the rot that seeps from wounds.
i like their eyes when they look at me and ooze.
i like their lips when they sigh and i can sneak myself within.
i like their hearts when they jitter with laughter and smiles so brightly that i might be able to eat them as my own.
i don’t like people, rather, i like what they can give me, what i can steal from them, for a lack of love and a desperation for affection.

i hate what i do, and if i can find within anyone a moment that they don’t, i attach, and gnaw savoringly whatever i can take. i consume, a nip at a time, i gorge.

i’m embarrassed, and afraid.

is this what I’ve made myself? along with what has been made OF me? am i to blame? as much, or likely more than whatever else can be blamed?
i’m the one…it’s my fault

i don’t understand, but i think that i might…

i’m not real. not THIS me, paddling on the surface clinging to tangibility.
so, who are we, friend?
my friend…

have i made the same mistake again?
have i primed another heart for my own ends?
have i set up another illusion to pilfer what i want?
have i been disrespectful of what i love… all over again?

friend, the faces of the past are nails.
cold, condemning nails ready to be set in my head, my chest.
now yet another one.
…another face, another voice, another set of eyes – to drive me closer to some self-perpetuated insanity of my own breeding.
another nail, locked steadfast, deeper than bone

…yet another added.

i want to cry.
to yell and burn and crumble.
it presses through my ribs
behind the sternum and caught in my voice, and yet all i can do is remain still – caged.

i can feel the black, the rot, dripping out of the lines and staining me, forever more and more in drowning, because i can’t bring myself to do anything but be still.

i can feel the little thoughts inside, gnashing away softly, that soon i will forget they are even there…again.
forget that their sea of eyes turn and swirl at everything i do, ready to consume when the numb set in

friend, my truest friend, corral the dark, make me feel safe inside it. let me hold someone, and glimmer warmth before i’m struck and returned from where i crawled.

remember, friend, who we are.

‘i am, i am,
wounded by righteous greed…
…then yearn to sink my teeth into something as contemptable as i,
and make them scream the things that i cannot.’ “