Somebody Please Tell Me How To Live - 11/22/11

Somebody please tell me how to live because I’m obviously doing something wrong.  Somebody please tell me how to be alive because I have messed up too many times to try to try again.  Somebody please tell me how to live because I feel like I should be dead, I feel like I’ve reached an end, paused to stare at it, and then crossed into it, disregarded everything that could have and would have ever existed to be in a state of nonexistence and spend hours talking about suicide with a sweet young boy who I thought didn’t know me, but who just might have the potential to.  Now he says that he’d only ever kill himself if he had nothing left to learn from life, and I am envious because I want to have only one path that leads to me ending my life instead of all of them.  He says he thinks about suicide the way the President thinks about nuclear attacks: just as a plan, in case he ever needs it.  And then there’s me: telling him to stop it because he better not ever need it, while I’m actually trying not to plan anything so that when that day comes, and I know it will come, I will have to take a few minutes to plan it then, instead of leaping right into it.  I guess some part of me isn’t ready to die if I’m still hoping that taking a minute to plan will be taking a minute to rethink it.  Or maybe I’m just too scared to see where my mind will take me if I let my thoughts continue on down that path.

And somewhere this turned from prose to poetry, from asking for a path to life to looking for the road to death.  And I’m surprisingly happy for a girl who just run a sharp edge over her leg until she bled.  Maybe it’s endorphins.  Or maybe it’s like I said, just chemicals in my head all messed up and mixed up and happy at all the wrong things and sad at all the right things.  And I mean that like I’m happy with the things that should make me sad and sad with the things that should make me happy, not like I’m happy when I shouldn’t be but sad when I should be resulting in always being unhappy, because I’m happy right now.  I just shouldn’t be.

And I don’t think I want to go to college.  And I don’t want to look at cap and gown packages because right now I don’t want to go to graduation.  I don’t want to make plans to go shopping for prom dresses, because my excuse for not wanting to go to prom isn’t that it’s just too mainstream, but that my brain is unfairly unhinging and wishing for nonexistence before I get that far in life.  All I want to do is nothing.  I want to sit with Christopher Robin in a tree and say, “Oh, nothing,” when someone asks how I’m feeling.  And it won’t be grammatically correct and I will not care.

That.  That right there.  That is what I actually want.  I want to not care.  I want to not care so hard that grammar flies out the window.  I want to not care so hard that I ask that boy out before his computer crashes.  I want to not care so hard that I could drive off a bridge.  I want to not care so hard I die.

Red Pen - 11/19/11

So I think I’ll write this poem in red pen
because today
I am feeling like the
stereotypical emo kid
and I feel as though my hair
should be in my face
but I have it clipped back neatly in its place
the same way I confine all my emotions
to one tiny space
and force my cheeks to stretch and crease
into a giddy smile.

Let me tell you about this day.
It has technically been great.
Speech tournament,
a dozen finals,
a guarantee to the top three.
And even I:
timidly doubtful,
nervously condescending,
truthfully falsifying praise;
have managed to honor my team
and hopefully be in the top three
in Poetry.
Because Poetry is my thing.
My calling.  My purpose.
My soul’s freeing.
And it would be rather insulting if I wasn’t good
at my thing.

Now, tell me,
if everything is going so great,
why do I feel the need to run away,
hide in a window ledge,
and write poetry in red
like the stereotypical emo kid
my soul thinks it would be so great to be?
Tell me why my thighs
have once again been mutilated,
degraded,
and consistently contemplated
to be worthless,
except as a cutting board
to prepare my soul to be eaten?
First you have to slice it out,
open your skin and draw your soul out of your blood.
Now beat it,
with skipped meals and minimal sleep,
and cruel thoughts, and hateful, self-directed speech.
Now eat it.
Eat your soul,
tears dripping from your lips,
hopes churning in your stomach,
dreams caught in your esophagus.
Wipe the corners of your mouth with blood-stained nylons.

You see,
now that I can talk to my ex without wanting to die,
I wonder what he would do
if he saw my thighs,
splintered by poly-carbons crystallized
and then fractured,
brought to the skin like rapture,
spilling hot lava on cold, pale streets.

I tried,
oh I tried,
to take ten minutes for myself
to gently kill myself
with words that maim myself to write.
I tried to take ten minutes,
just ten little minutes on my own,
to unload a long day of pain,
but two sweet young ladies
came my way
and asked to sit with me and chat.

They wanted to chat.

I sat in a corner
writing suicidal verse in red pen,
trying to free myself from
whatever curse
fate had bestowed upon the
chemicals in my brain
and they wanted to chat

about boys.
about their events.
about their parents.
about their siblings.
about their friends.

They wanted to chat
and they wanted me to listen
and I could have done that
but it wasn’t just that.

They wanted me to speak.

I sat in a corner,
writing masochistic verse in red pen,
contemplating scars and sex,
and they had no idea,
so they thought my thoughts
might be as the always were:
clean.
kind.
contained.
restrained.
It took quite and effort
to lock my verse away
and spend my ten minutes of freedom
sweetly listening,
appropriately nodding,
and sincerely responding
to those sweet young girls.

So now I take a few rushed seconds
to lock myself in a bathroom stall
and, in the most cliché way possible,
unload this poem,
unlock my madness,
unhinge my sadness,
before returning to the world
and my façade.

But I’m Always Thinking About Blood - 11/11/11

I think it’s kind of
steamy, kind of
sexy, kind of
pretty, and kind of
wrong.
I think it’s like make up:
shouldn’t we all be beautiful
without it?  But since it
exists, we aren’t.
But it heats me up
in a way it shouldn’t.
Makes me shudder and
smile and cringe.
Makes me
close my eyes and think about
loose sheets and blood.

But I’m always thinking about blood.

And sometimes
I think I need it.
Other times
I think I’m addicted.
But mostly I just think
about it.  I think
about it
when I wake up and get dressed
and see lines on my thighs.  I think
about it
when I skip breakfast,
because all guilt is
the same guilt.  I think
about it
in class, when my mind
wanders off.  I think
about it
on the bus, staring
off into space.  I think
about it
in the shower.

But I’m always thinking about blood.