Failed Short Poem - To All Those Who Have Left Me and Will Leave Me

 This came out of me suddenly. Starting with a small snippet I wrote in my notebook a few weeks ago with no real plans ever to return to it or build upon it or make it into anything. But a profound numbness and apathy has gripped the very core of my shadowed being and tore into me an inescapable feeling of hopelessness, isolation, and a total loss of my sense of self. There is no self, there is no me, there are only those around me who have pummeled me into the shifting, squirming little bug that is my existence. And from that, these worthless little words emerged. 

Hoarded

Liquid stitches of time

Dissolving

With my body's cold descent

Into the blurry, bloodied

Oceanic depths 

Wrapped up in dead sea scrolls

And several figments

Of thinning hair strands 

Another millennium-long night

Coloring me in numbness 

And dejection. 

Dead cats paw

At all the worms

Exploding out of your heart,

And wail at 

Your ghostly visage

Seeping into the broken walls

Of your joyless childhood home

Decorated in dirtied gauze

And weeping shadows.

No one’s lived here for years

All signs of any life eradicated into 

Yellow, mold-covered ceiling

But I still see

You dancing with the cobwebs

Illuminated by routine flashing ambulance lights

Shifting forms in between waves of needles,

A bedspread of cigarette ash

And the first surge of blood

I pulled out between your legs. 

No matter who you turn into 

No matter who I end up 

Finding you in next,

Or what vessel chooses to momentarily

Siphon out my love,

I won’t be able to escape this place.

I won’t be able to 

Define myself

On my own. 

This is where they’ll find me

If they dare to look,

Fragile, stitched together

A monstrosity of uncanny fate

Fascimile of a heart

Exploded.

Pale freezing blood crawls up my arms

Hands of a clock dissolving 

Into noisy, sporadic sharpened pulses

She and me 

And you and her

And I 

Are altogether dead. 

What a meager and pitiful existence

To be nothing on my own,

With the rusted crucifix melded to my chest

With the carnival scents masking my pungent decay

With the cobwebs and decade-old cigarette smoke

Replacing my lungs,

With the object of your hatred and targeted degradation

Summoning my new reflection,

With all your empty sweet nothings crawling through my exit wounds

And curling up to die 

Like dehydrated caterpillars

Suffocating in their chrysalis cocoon,

I finally realize that I am nothing

Only ever defined by

All of the people who have injected me with false meaning

And just as abruptly

Left me -

I take every piece of them 

And all of their fears

With me

On my eternal way down 

To the cold,

Lightless ground. 

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