blue like a lack of oxygen

i see a cage of ribs sticking out of the ground. i see nothing. it took me a few minutes just to write that sentence. i didn’t really write it though, my fingers did. i couldn’t hear or think of anything because all i could feel was white noise. my fingers feel very heavy on the keyboard, that’s all i feel. they feel like rocks. or paperweights. my existence is the equivalent of a paperweight. and that’s how my heart feels. you probably think i’m being weird right now. making this up. no. i do not feel real right now. i feel drugged. a dripping icicle. keeping a half awake eye on panic, fear. expecting it the way you expect scary, dozing preliminary-dreams, after you’ve looked at a shadow in the dark the wrong way and you can’t un-look at it.  the sudden panic of waking up inside a completely zipped up sleeping bag and discovering you have no arms, no hands with which to free yourself, and you suffocate to death under quiet, muted stars. sometimes the immense weight of the world sneaks up real quiet and smashes all that careful order in my head into pieces. i am staring into a living room of daydreams and setbacks. the structure reinforces itself.  like the terrible beauty of an industrial landscape at dawn. a morning shaded by clouds of chlorine and old broken windows colored like rusted pennies. a twist of thinking dislocates such a landscape from the actual human pain it represents. instead, it’s like an abstract idea of pain made manifest, a Bosch painting hellscape you can drive through, and it becomes a thing of beauty because it’s so stripped and messy and pure. maybe defeat is a relief. it’s like i stumble into this diorama and i instinctively pull out a cigarette. i’ve only ever been a hopeless, self-destructive smoker. and then i switch and somehow, briefly, everything is all right in the world. i could do it my whole life. i’ve been doing it my whole life. it’s the same no matter where you go. or who you are with. you sit on some concrete rubble, coagulated synapses, soul ruins, smoking your cigarette and you briefly contemplate the never-ending gas leak or air raid sirens that were your life, but they are quiet today. all that’s left in this stillness, this chemical silence. all i wanted was to be a single green thing in the grey. i wanted someone to take exception to my singularity.

being in love. the falling, the aching and the needing to hold someone always.  the fear of loss, of losing anyone you’ve made such a part of yourself. it is easy to go along and create yourself. gather the best parts of everyone you have ever loved even for an instant and slip them inside of a formless skin, with the rest of this collection. when you’ve spent too many years waiting for people to love you as much as you love them. i no longer care if you understand any of this.