Tracks

You’re there again

Choking on your disease

Black tar tracks and raw red mounds

Pickling your arms

And you’re grinning at everyone

On a tenacious rerun:

“I am doing great.  Things are going so good.”

High on your own ego

High with your pernicious demon

That kills you a little more each time.

And I ache for you. 

I’ll die with you.

Be left standing alone

Hating every single memory you left behind.  

All you desperate poets

Diligently searching for the perfect words

To describe your solitude, melancholy, the knives, the cuts,

Hopelessness, hatred, despondency, disease,

Famine of the Soul. 

But to me, depression is about

Hitting snooze twenty times on your alarm clock

Because getting out of bed is just….

Too.  Fucking.  Hard.  

Blunt Trauma

It’s that tone you take with me.

As if I am a telemarketer or

Your bloated cousin. 

I can stop talking if you want. 

Let the quietness drown out the pretention

And in the transparent lull

I can fully perceive

How empty your heart is..  

Color BLIND

I am white. 

If that made you cringe,

Then you won’t hear my voice

That is as inflamed, violent, as subdued and

Melancholy as yours. 

Just like you,

I traveled over flammable mounds of garbage,

In impenetrable alleyways.  I have heard the howls of

hopelessness and felt the impregnable void of loneliness. 

I too moved in a world constructed only for somebody else

and learned to navigate the darkness. 

Except,

I’m not really white.

Are you still listening? 

I am African. I am Latina.  I am Eskimo, Polynesian, Chinese, Mulatto,

I AM.

All of you.  

I’m a mistake cloaked in compassion,

I linger in your hallways, inhale your musky scent;

Cigarettes and oil;

I swallow your leftovers and amble in your stilted shadows;

Your anointed nymph, forever waiting

For your recovery.

But she waits too, with needles and tar.

A spineless debutante, caressing you with necrosis  

Replete with corpulent tranquilizers,

Unconditional numbness and love.

She’s a lumbering beast

With a fistful of pills and rancor.

And I understand

Why you choose her.       

In my homelessness, I have made another bad, but desperate, choice.  I ended up staying with Adam for a few days.  He went to jail (again) and when he got out, he needed help, so I said I would help him.  I paid for the registration for his car and got insurance on it.  Then, somehow, I ended up staying there for about 5 days.  And some of it was nice and the rest was absolute pain.  That type of pain that aches like an ulcer in your chest and makes you cry.  He doesn't come around me, ignores me, sometimes acts like I am just a nuisance actually, makes me feel very very bad about myself.  And last night I was there and I was helping him with a job interview for the next day and while we were on the computer a message pops up from the LADY IN THE SKY Alexis.  What does he do?  He shuts off the computer so i can't read anything and no we are not together and no it shouldn't even bother me but it did.  Very much.  So much I couldn't sleep.  I started thinking about how much he never even speaks to me unless he has to and is not attracted to me anymore and that ulcer pain just comes and overwhelms me.  I just thought over and over "you have to get out of here.  You just have to leave."  But if felt stupid really because I had nowhere to go.  Around 2:30 in the morning, I just picked up my stuff and left.  And he saw me leave through the window and I haven't heard a word from him which is just what I expected and in so many ways I just feel better.  I slept in my car in a couple of different parking lots and cried a lot and thought about that bridge by the Gateway center that lets you stand on the rails and how easy that would be, just to fall straight into the ground and not feel this terrible emptiness anymore.  At one point, I did fall asleep and when I woke up a half hour later, I thought "I feel so much better now.  So much better."  And then for some reason the pain hit me even harder all at once and I cried until my cheeks hurt and that chest ache surges with cries like that.  So I just stayed there and then when it was 7:45 I went to work thinking that it's not that I really want to be dead, I just don't wan to be alive.
And that is what Adam does to me.  Every.  Single.  Time.  

Here I go again, in the hopes that no one I know is actually reading any of this.  I just need a place to go to spill out all of this bad stuff.  This weekend was horrible.  I had no money and had Max with me and on Friday I had bought Max food but by Friday night my brother had eaten it all.  So this weekend, and in truth, I can barely remember the weekend, only that it was full of a lot of sleeping and hunger.  And poor Max, poor Max.  I did make sure he had something, but in thinking back I am not even 100% sure of anything I did at all.  We went camping with Andellyn and her boyfriend.  I remember that.  Just a fire pit and marshmallows and Max did like that because he wanted to go again.  But other than that, I just did nothing.  Yesterday I didn't have enough gas to get to work and so was going to take the train...but I missed the train by about one minute and I brilliantly just decided not to go to work at all.  And I slept in my car all day.  I mean all day.  At one point I used what was left in my checking account; $1.76 and bought a bean burrito and coke.  And then I slept some more.  My whole body hurts today from head to toe.  But I went home and my brother and sister in law had managed to come up with food somehow and they fed Max but I was mad because I had bought him food that should have lasted.  It doesn't matter.  I went home last night and took a sleeping pill and couldn't sleep.  Was awake all night and aching and was on that couch with Max and what would I do without Max...but I think I am depressed, know that I am because I just don't care much about anything at all.  Everything is getting to me, every little mistake and I am afraid every time I leave, even just to the bathroom, because my boss gets upset when I leave and I hate this job actually.  And I find very little enjoyment in it, but then that applies to almost everything right now.  My stomach hurts again but if I leave, if I leave, my boss will know.  The last time I did I came back and she was standing over my desk.  Just while I went to the bathroom because my stomach is a mess.  My head is a mess.  I thought I had already hit rock bottom, I did hit rock bottom, and this is just another bottom not quite as close as the other bottom.  But worse than at other times, is that I have no real friends.  Kurt was my friend and he is the very one who put me in this place this time.