Short Poem of Continued Pain

 I am trying desperately to purge myself. I am searching unendingly for stability and clarity. I am starving for a purpose that I don't have the energy to actually fulfill or maintain. I'm not writing enough, it's becoming more and more difficult to sit in one place for too long and to work on any one creative endeavor. I don't trust myself, I don't have faith in my own abilities, I am struggling to distract myself from thoughts of self-harm - a habit I rather not fall back into. New chemicals are being prescribed to me, I'll have to see where they take me. In the meantime, I am weening off what I was on and I fear that it is having an adverse effect on me. A great brain fog permeates everything and there's no more capacity for rational thought. All this is to say that the following poem is not my best, it's not good at all, but it was written like many others; in a moment of intense panic and emotional turmoil. I hastily wrote down whatever it was I was feeling and decided to stop when I felt I'd said enough. It's a short poem, much shorter than what I usually like to write. Something about long poems filled with nonsense is far more satisfying to write and finish - but I don't have the energy for that now and the poem that follows is on a subject that I am frankly sick of writing but simultaneously still feel every day and thus can't help but write about it. Dreams of what happened still haunt me, I have to write about it or else there's nowhere else for it all to go. All of this is already longer than the poem itself. Publishing anything I write here is starting to feel like an intense and very public display of self-harm. Does anyone get anything out of this at all? One day I'll stop. 

How I feel

The Void Overflows

Another nightmare swells

Torture outlined in now-poisoned photographs 

A slug-like skin graft

Stretching across the limits of my face

Opening its teeth dripping

With blackened honey 

Personified grief

All that stares back at me 

Proclaimed itself to be long dead 

Ruthlessly set itself against me 

Time passes into memories of pain

Perseverance - what it amounts to is futility

And borrowed mortality

I chose to be folded into perpetual unrest

The edges of an emotional explosion

Who knew you would sustain my abyss

Coloring the years that past

Suddenly nothing means anything at all 

Collapse me into the gun barrel

Embalm me already 

Pierce me into a cheap plastic entombment 

Cheer at the planned destruction

Someone join me in my self-immolation

My eyelids are shorn off 

Unbearably sucking in the stained shadows

Of your betrayal

The only remnants left after you walked away 

You exist to haunt me in the final goodbye

Now the void that holds me overflows. 

The morning that follows 

Is puppeteered haphazardly by wraiths

And stray flesh-rending reminders of what used to be

I’ll never know if you feel

What you’ve made me feel.