Ketamine

Waves of saliva race for the shores of my teeth

As my hands turn to spiders and scatter across my keyboard

And my eyes spin like plates when nothing stirs

I am healing as I am disassembled and reassembled

Spent

How can you ask me to spend my life here
Always asking for permission
For space, for rights, for my vitality

Contrition

I have so many things to say
All the shame I've been entrusted fills my mouth instead
And I am smothered when I try to deliver
This depravation is mutilation
And I am still languishing alone

Counterfeit

You can sustain the body
But when the soul flickers
When the soul is homesick for its nest
Away from this sensory coil
Our only consistency here is change and decay
I don't know where to find restoration
When I can't find rest, least of all in sleep where
My past will always find me
The fog and shadows played tricks
And outwitted my better judgment
Somehow I'm left with the counterfeit

Foreigner In A Foreign Land

There's something inside me that's older than I am
And when I feel depressed I feel it stir
It compels me to leave
It urges me to return
And so I lie in the dust
On the floor beneath an altar
Decorated with ribbons
Celebrating traumas survived
And lay cold silver coins on my eyes
Straightening the chain holding my mogen david
Pulling the altar cloth across to repel the chill
And I feel myself sink into the dust
My body biding time before an inevitable decay
And it sinks through the floorboards to meet the earth
Stirring restlessly in the interval
Between ashes and ashes
And it's enveloped by dark musty arms
Returning my body to its home
To which I will soon enough return
I'll be home when they tuck me in,
Softly and gently, pulling the dirt up to my chin
When I am again what I have always been
And I am indistinguishable
I am earth again

The Bat

Creature of the night
I like you cannot see the light
I am comfortable in this darkness
Eating morsels of my sins
Upside down in my own identity
I slept for so long and like you
I have awoken without a dawn
And flown into the darkness

Artificial Elements

Used to hate my braces
but embraced them for making me closer
to a cyborg, for helping me approach singularity
And I was ready yesterday
Ready to be unable to distinguish
between what parts of me are organic and what are artificial
I'm ready to leave this body and exist on another plane,
be it celestial or artificial

Monstre

Raise your hand if you've got depression
And the meds aren't cutting it
So you've gotta cut yourself instead
Remember when you asked for creativity?
Beggars can't be choosers
So now you're your own worst enemy
Your most creative saboteur
Make yourself paranoid about good days
How long will they last and are they real?
Celebrate for just a moment
And berate yourself for eternity
When you inevitably fall again
Remind yourself of all your failures
And suggest to try again is hubris
I have become a master in self-deception
What do I want and who am I?
Unquestioned laws of self are suddenly
Up for debate like it's an election year
Trying to ruin my own life
For petty reasons like uncertainty
How do you evict a part of yourself
When you don't even know who you are
Has the monster inside become the majority?

Happy Pills

In the final hour, the medicine administered
Reduces my thoughts so sinister
Dampening my perceptions and depressive deceptions
Suffocating and smothering my creative conceptions
I find a familiar peace in the silence
Delivered by pill, a miracle of science,
And a dullness that has never failed
To leave me apathetic, a will to thrive foiled

Stuck

I want to go home and never return to this wicked world
But I am too weak to break the chains of my mortal coil
And too soft to free myself from pain by delegating it to others

Aphasia

There are no words in the English language that adequately express the turmoil of trauma or the emotional storms that fill its sails. My terror has always left my mouth as shrieks and giggles.

Grip

I'm slipping inside myself
I'm crawling under a blanket of desensitivity
Trying to discern reality through a wicked haze
Sometimes I feel myself come up for air
And I remember what clarity looks like
But my memory is short and soon I am under again

Intimate

This was supposed to be my sanctuary
It was built on fault lines and rotten wood
But it was mine and I called it home
But lately it has conspired to
Evict the soul inside of it
To empty itself of its life force
And crumble into ash
My body promised my soul at conception
"In sickness and in health,
Til death do us part"
I don't understand why it insists on
Choosing the soil in a grave over me
It is the most intimate betrayal

In the Hole

Depression traps a bully inside your skull
And locks your heart outside the room
And begs your fingers to tear away
At the smallest pieces of yourself
In an effort to disappear into thin air unnoticed
It destabilizes all your values and plans
And dismantles your identities
Until there's nothing left of you
And I feel myself slip away

Honestly

I feel I have reached the end of my rope
And now I'm left unravelling the ends
To tie them together again
In a single long thread
To try to reach the finish line
And I'm running out of ends to tie

Over Easy

Now I'm cracked again
And the illness has seeped in once more
And honestly I'm angry at you
Because you were the one who dropped me first
And you dropped me again most recently
I don't know why I let you hold me anymore
Perhaps it's because most times you don't drop me
And it's easy to forget you've been dropped
When someone's strong and gentle hands are clasped around your shell
It's hard to see the butter smeared on your fingers
Or to smell the toast in the toaster
Or the hot oil on the skillet
When you're safe inside your shell

Curly

I was raised
Indoctrinated in capitalism
Taught to measure my worth
By my rate of production
But never supplied with an abled body
I learned to play in pain
To normalize the broken parts of me
In order to survive in a society
With no space for the unproductive
Never supplied with an allistic mind
I struggled to shutter my thoughts
To focus on a single concept
Rather than a concept's singularity
When my intuition compelled
My interdisciplinary tendencies

Chronic

I am sick and the land is too.
My gut is my mouthpiece.
Perhaps I am the gut of the land,
And in turn, the mouthpiece.
I seek, always, to know the land
as I know myself.
We are one and the same,
undivided and whole,
simultaneously, broken and morbid.
I steward the land and the land stewards me.
I learn. I profess. I profess to learn.
I profess.  I learn.  I learn to profess.

Aegreo

I was once told that
death does not wait for us
to figure out how to live.
But what can be done for
those of us who have stumbled?
Are we left with only a shift
in our own perspectives?
Will it be enough?

Bilingual

The stomach is the body's mind,
A second brain so to speak.
I'm certain it knows more than I do.
If only my primary brain and stomach
Were more fluent in each other's language,
I'm sure I would be better for it.