Pen and Paper: Poetry & Prose (2020)

the pitch black darkness

I want to dig you up.
I want to unearth the body who failed me.
I want your soothing hands.
The smell of breakfast on a school day.
Coffees in the morning are never the same.
Sleeping at night is gruesome.
I want to ask you all these questions in my head.
My chest is a million question marks.
I am deprivation.
Hungry for your words,
they will never know rest,
they will never be heard,
I am lost,
I am heartbreak,
the blinding, searing, paralyzing realization
unending and unrelenting.
I am homeless,
a box of broken glass is my bed.
I want your comfort, I get your carcass.
I want to laugh at the hilarity.
Lash out at the cruelty.
I used to tell myself I would go first,
that this world is unlivable, unimaginable
without you.
How could I ever live in such reality?
You have a lot of explaining to do!
I still have the questions.
They will never grow out.
I will never grow up.
I lost my chance when I lost you.
How do I do this now?

The soundless rush of air in and out of my lungs
are the only remnants that tell me I am still here.
I want to strike out at everything,
to burst into an ensemble of inexplicable
that will never be enough to encapsulate
the big bang in my chest that started it all.
I am an inward explosion.
I am the only witness to the massacre.
I do not want to be here.
I do not understand how this body still works.
I am a lone system of circulation,
veins and arteries.
Working together to keep up the mad orchestration.
My insides are constant liquid.
Outside is a picture of manipulative ease.
Inside is the expert suffocation and drowning.
Just drown me.
I did not learn to swim.
Oh, how convenient,
my body's betrayal,
its natural survival instinct
to float amidst the tidal insanity.
This system keeps me afloat.
I am floating, denser than gravity,
but gravity is cruel, downward pulling you to solid ground
when nothing feels concrete.
Such masterful frenzy.
I am not a fighter, I am all bruised.
Just knock me out, be firm, just be done.
Everything is a white-hot knife plunged in every available surface of my body.
The jabs are painful enough, but they do not kill which is the part that actually kills.
I am sliced open from nose to navel,
my intestines plucked out,
a gruesome display on the table.
Send me to a pitch black downward spiral,
knock this breath that never seem to end.

Grief is paralyzing.
Getting up alone is insanity.


- the pitch black darkness