When Other People Start to Look Like Mirrors

Tectonic shift. Sifting. High rise collapse.

But I’m home now; it’s safe now. This is the place where dreams go to try and make you die. Fitful sleep, if you can call closing your eyes that. But it won’t always be this way.

The blood’s presence in my veins is diminishing, relatively speaking.

How numb is this feeling, relatively speaking? I’m getting bored, and I know it. I don’t know what the next new, big thing is, but I’m damn sure gonna dig my talons and teeth in when I find it, until I tear it to pieces or drive it away.

Using people and blaming them for the results. A recurrent pattern.

But I can’t say I got anything other than exactly what I wanted. Honest with myself until I get entangled in webs of thought, unrelated–erroneous. I got what I wanted, what something in me knew I needed.

A last cigarette burning through a long sleeve at the cuff where a heart used to be(at).

Patience.

Unidentified objects. Subjects lost. Twisted in a cacophony of gramophonic grammatical contortions. Contusions, concussions.

Yeah, thoughts are speeding up, but everything else is slowing down.

Diagnosis: desperate youth. Prognosis: good, if he can only find a friend. It’s becoming more difficult, as of late. Trust issues, alcohol, alienation, blatant attacks, defensive posturing. His friends say he’s turtling up; he’s bleeding out. His thoughts are pushing out.

But I’m still here, even if he’s leaving.

So would it be this way? Is it like running through a wrecking crew? Meat grinder? I’m glad someone’s winning. Always the need to feel unique, to feel like the exception, like something’s been built that could never break. Fallacy. Adolescent personal fable. Sophomoric.

But that straight and narrow, man… Don’t need it.

Appendages buckled. Thirteen stitches to keep his insides in. It could have been worse, and everyone (roughly) survived, so everything is (approximately) okay, right?

That need to feel guilt and let it go, inducing panic, turmoil, fear, and self-loathing in others.

Powerful. Blunt trauma. He almost made it, but now he’s someone else. Haunting familiar corners. But who can be believed in a bulletstorm? Salvos were fired. Decisions were made, choices ignored, overlooked. This is justification. Morality is diminishing, relatively speaking.

I saw him there. A head and hands, a quiet heart. Burning eyes.
At least someone did him a favor.