Apologies; the frame is fried.

I am such a horrible person.  In this new solitude, without blinders or mufflers or anything, I started reading through my old notebooks.

One of them was dedicated to the time I spent in Missouri.

I can still feel those emotions, and their resurging in me as I take in the pages is so discomforting.  How do I convince myself to torture and eradicate everything?  How do I keep from destroying myself completely?

I haven’t felt this kind of restlessness since I was a teenager.  It’s been that long.  But, anti-depressants are death.  Anxiolytics are death.  Opiates are not just death, but suicide.

All I can do every day is ignore the churning swirl in the seat of my stomach.  The agitation that I sublimate every hour of every day.  I hope to God that it disappears.

I am so afraid of trying to become a normal sheep, because I know that I can’t.  I am afraid of being able to find a job, because I feel like I never will.  I am terrified of fucking this whole trip up, of relying on my mother and brother for money until they get sick of me.  But, this is all just the withdrawal-induced depression talking… isn’t it?

I also have never felt so alone.  I have no one to talk to, and while my roommate is my best friend, I don’t like to relate to people in that deeper way, unless I’m doing a lot of drugs.  Maybe back when I was 23, I would have opened up to him.

But I’m 28.  I have no job, no income… a really bad case of The Itch, and a vague determination to get through withdrawals so that I can live my life sober.  I can’t even think of what it would be like to try to relate to people here, or anywhere… because I know that there is always a 99% chance that they are the kinds of people that will just annoy me, or will never become the kind of people I can truly relate to.  That’s just the way it is.

My solitude has never felt this encompassing.  This strangling.

From a late summer, years ago:

My emptiness is the bow that bowed
under salted air and ocean blows
that fell ceaselessly until I was thrown.

I have empathy and the love in stone:
Timeless, instanced, windflown;
the feeling that I am monotone…
the feeling of a stretching undertow.

With the green and white, the colored Spring
flowing, pouring into my something,
sacred triangles are on false legs,
while I still want to be great,
like the undulating sea;
the same feeling that once drowned me.

I don’t have that phantom-shape,
the nonexistent hole of wasted space:
The hunter who cannot provide;
the author with only a weak reply.
It is no ghost in me;
rather, organic and encompassing…
And still, still I try,
as the horde of weights divide
and lacerate our endless shine.

 

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For every cornerstone, a scratch;
each loophole, a catch;
routes to feel the crash.
I wonder how this all makes sense
when my soul, the floating wanderer,
the minstrel catches his breath,
stares in wonder of the path
and is afraid to step ahead.
”You feel this too, I know”,
I’d shout from my transparent banner,
my warcry, futile, dry.
At least it is to me, for I am nothing
if not determined, yet I have no way to breathe
because I have a lump inside of me.
I feel it is all a dead end’s growing seed.

What can I do for you?
What can I really do for you?
When could this ever be alight,
ablaze, except through fantasy?

 

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The feathers in my eyes were just knives, turned inward….