Poetry Attempt: An Explosion of Grief

 After finishing my previous short story, which didn't exactly shape up as I wanted, I have sunken back into the depths of despondent self-doubt and self-hatred. Not that those things ever necessarily go away but the past week or so have been exhaustingly heavy with profoundly negative thoughts directed solely at myself. Worst of all, the nighttime - a time when I would usually feel the most at peace, the most creative, the most accepting of myself, the readiest and most willing to dive into my creative writing pursuits - has become demonstrably awful. Something happens, perhaps it's from the medication, that when night starts to come on I can feel my entire existence sink face down into the mire. Days are difficult and largely spent trying my best to distract myself through various pursuits or hobbies to varying (mostly negligible) success, but nights are now impossible. I feel every negative thought and suicidal urge start to tear away at the thinning framework of my mind and the feelings of isolation and betrayal surge violently through me to no end. Then there's the idea of trying to fall asleep, knowing full well that I will most likely get a maximum of three hours of uninterrupted sleep that will be littered with bursts of stress-inducing, teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling nightmare nonsense. Only to wake up much too early and fall back into the nightmares and finally start my day with the weight of everything that went wrong driving my head down into the dirt. What's the point in writing? What's the point in working towards anything? What's the point in persevering? What do I have to live for exactly? Nothing satiates this grand existential unrest. I am forever stuck thinking that my happiest moments in life have already happened and, try as I did, I couldn't hang on to them. And what is there to prove me wrong, exactly? I've been discarded and erased. But I still write from time to time in a desperate attempt to purge my mind so I don't turn back to unhealthy habits of self-harm. Although, it doesn't prove to have any worth whatsoever for me - and the quality is only ever on a downward slant. Writing always has been and always will be an unfairly cruel and torturous affair. 

That is all to say that this latest "poem" is not really a poem but an ugly explosion of feelings written in a blunt and stupidly non-poetic way. It's becoming increasingly difficult to focus on anything at all - I can't read, I can't watch anything, I can't write, I can't simply exist in this world without overwhelming fear, hatred, loss, confusion, and sadness taking control of me. It's too late for me, I've been abandoned and whatever is going on in my head will take me and win. 

An Explosion of Grief

A chemical whirlwind, 
Sticking chalky little pills
Into all the gashes I’m lining myself with.
Psychotropic residue, dissolving with the
Blood pooling underneath a heavily corroded bed frame
I’m trapped in the hideous break of day.

There’s a stinging coldness latched on my bones,
Freezing all the pockets of emptiness
That you bore through me. 
I’m sick of recalling.
Surrounded by shards of my previous mask, 
My thinning body is twisting in the assault of sunlight. 
Feel too clearly my veins loosening their knots,
Up at night preventing myself from snapping them open. 
Always wake up much too early
Give all waking hours over to a tangible mental rot,
What did you think would happen? 

Every face muscle pulled taut,
Meat hooks piercing my perpetual snarl
Hooked to the floor I find myself coiled on.
Your perfumed spirit is suffocating me
And pent-up tears are leaving acidic festering pores,
An army of grief-manifested lesions
Trafficking up my flesh.
I can’t crawl out of my forced rictus, 
Still, I don’t want to retain whatever semblance of humanity
I’ve managed to hang on to.
Let it all go.
Close my curtains and gift to me the end of time. 

-

All I have left from you,
Dreams of short, measured bursts of abandonment, 
The totalitarian anguish of the loss you perpetuated,
All the avenues of myself I want to destroy,
It all poisons me, defiles every moment of every day
I want to stitch my nights shut
And flay myself to pieces with the remaining nylon.

It feels as if years have already passed,
Nothing anyone says cuts through,
That my life has been expunged, dug up, and desecrated by loss.
Our last day together,
The stale air crashed down upon me,
I lost myself forever in the cavernous void
That your desertion held open for me. 
Why even try?

The blood flow, unknown pharmaceutical purge, 
An emptiness of insomnia, 
I’m long dead to you, aren’t I?

Alchemical stomach acid surging ineffectively,
All I have left is the razor blade,
And the question of
If my ceiling fan will hold up my weight.
I wish I could let my corpse speak for itself,
Tell you all the things you don’t want to hear,
And can’t bring yourself to face.
I don’t think I can hesitate any longer
To flip the switch of my existence. 

Who knows where you are now? 
A new psychological entrapment - a harmful disappointment in the making
You’re tethered to the world of your own self-destruction,
Strangling my ghost as you go down. 
A grand transference of pain,
Unwieldy trauma wrapped in twigs and cemetery dust,
I accepted it all
But you left me after you couldn’t bear to see
Me as the new reflection of your self-hate. 

Do you remember anything at all?
All that I’m forced to linger with,
I plotted our burials a long time ago,
Entwined myself fully in your suffering,
Wanting nothing more than to hold your putrescent hand
As we watched our world come down.

Now I stand alone in the overcrowded graveyard,
Every mausoleum a hall of mirrors
Playing out my contempt for this newfound meaninglessness.
Wilting under jagged rocks that explode with
The horrid light of day that I find myself so afraid of.
The comfort of night descending
Now eviscerated,
There’s nothing left to look forward to,
There’s nowhere for me to haunt,
My battered bones have been consecrated by your absence
And now have nowhere left to lie. 

Deplorably left forever,

To squirm uncontrollably in the crumbling boots of my existence.

Profound jealousy of moonlit headstones,

It never ends.

My love buried and beaten into the ground by hateful swirling fog.

On my hands and knees before it,

Coating my masticated fingernails,

Stuffing my throat with charnel dirt.

If I could locate this feeling, I would cut it out.

I’m curling up on the floor like a starved maggot,
A grin of pain, mutilating myself, gorging on my useless flesh,
Waiting for smoke inhalation to cut off all thoughts to my brain,
Unflinchingly bleeding out
Under the dominance of your shadow. 

My survival has run out,
The night is coming on more strongly by the day,
Why do I still feel your stress?

Existing in sickness and constant fear
That I’ll never stop dreaming of you. 
Even after radical series of betrayals
After you succumbed to your suffering, 
Failed to acknowledge mine,
And strung me up in an isolated field
As a lighting rod for all your doubts and methods of self-sabotage,
My horrible, nagging love never wanned,
I would have done anything to save your fading smile,
But I’m nothing but a run-over spoiling carcass,
You seem to want to forget,
I’m right there, exploding in chunks underneath 
Your out-of-control wheels. 

Severed and boiling
In contaminated moonlight,
Sinking into crimson-soaked pavement
Crying till my eyes roll out of my bludgeoned face
At the words of Leonard Cohen telling me to,
“Go back to the world.” 
Something I’ll never be capable of. 

A life spent in suicidal entrapment,
My brain heaving and wriggling from
The iron spike of bipolarity that’s been
Impaled through it at birth.
I’m a smashed-up calliope,
Ringing out discordant cries
Into my dispossessed night.
All keys are jammed with teeth,
Crumbling out of my face
After the great cosmic gnashing of my skull.

Leave me like this. I’ve got nothing left to say.

This is different, this is the end.
All flowery, metaphorical jargon flushed out
Overused and ineffectual.
All contact unwillingly severed.
Fuck it. This is what you wanted.
But remember the comfort you felt,
When you were told
It won’t be your fault 
When I’m dead. 

-