A Short Poem Once Again About Loss, Dreams, and Confusion

 This is a sort of different one from the rest. What started out as a simple journal entry that poured out of me in the middle of the night during a moment of nightmare-inducing panic was slightly reworked, restructured, edited, and ever so slightly expanded upon to try to make this poem. Mostly because this is what I am fixated on, and also because I haven't written a poem in a bit and my notes and half-starts at new poems have become completely overwhelming and out of control. So I thought I'd ease myself back into it with a simple poem. A simple poem of the same regurgitated personal confessions of pathetic emotions as a strange ritual of self-harm. Needless to say, I really do not like this poem. Potentially more so than the rest, but here it is anyway because whatever...who cares. No one is here, no one cares, it's all collapsing rapidly now and the end is surely in sight. 

art by Ken Currie

Faded Out 

Another failed attempt

Trapped under ropes and sawblades

Lithium clouds fog the destroyed bedroom

Wretched reflection splintered and bloodied

Crawling out of my fragile blanket of flesh 

Yet falling deeper 

Into every new vertical cut. 

I thought I heard you whisper 

“Decay” 

At the moment when everything seemed 

To finally fade out. 

But there’s no you to be found 

Only wires tangled around my neck

Stained notebook pages 

Stapled down my legs 

Scratchy ink in blotchy circles 

Where my eyes used to be. 

It’s all rushing back

In loud feedback loops 

And angry balls of light 

Flashing across the hovering expanse 

Of ruptured dreams.

I shamefully wake up

Again

In a fit of tears,

Tethered to a version of reality 

I did not consent to. 

My malignant face streaked 

With ugliness, dripping globules of annihilated memories

Blown to infinitesimal smithereens;

Endless amount of shrapnel 

Lodged in every darkened, privative corner of my mind,

Crumbling mental corridors 

Cannibalistic refugees flooding my skull

With masticated, half-eaten remains 

Quivering lumps of unavoidable recollection,

Given up on hope

Futiley begging for merciful release,

All in dedication to you. 

There’s only the one guarantee,

Just when I feel I’ve finally escaped

And pushed past all that could have been,

Everything pulls me close,

Expands, infects, and poisons 

With the utmost clarity.

Familiarity weaponized against me,

I’m below your corroded epitaph 

Living on long-since expired time -

I was only ever meant 

To die with her. 

The dreams won’t stop,

My lovely, beautiful invited doom, 

The continued, perpetual harm 

I’ve committed myself to, 

Better to keep hold of the fatal void 

Encircling your phantasmagoric visage 

Then accept the finality of loss. 

Even if it’ll forever lead me 

To nothing but my next attempt

At haphazard self-annihilation. 

-

Does she still 

Suffer nightmares? 

Am I in any of them?

I miss when she could wake me up

And tell me 

What new fear possessed her dreams,

Before that fear became 

Me. 

-