Tag Archives: mental health

Do not open the window
when you wake up.

All night
you have been sleeping
and I have been burning
myself alive in the bed
beside you,
white hot blue
chewing up the sheets
as kindling.

I am ash and orange embers now,
I am barely lit now,
and if you open that window
the breeze will whirl in
and I’m afraid I might just
blow out.

You need to know
how easily
you could snuff me.

I do not want you to lose me;
I do not want to be lost.

One day, you will open the cupboard
to find a wine glass or some Tupperware
and the world will, without warning
or alarm, roll off the edge of the shelf
and coming crashing down.

The oceans will splash onto the linoleum,
onto the rug. All the dust in all the deserts
will rain down onto the couch and coffee table,
the hills will crumble, the mountains will break,
all the windows in all the cities will shatter
and fall, a thousand dangerous miles of glass
glittering on your kitchen floor.

Everything will hush.

Exhale the breath you are holding,
and go look for a dust pan, for a broom.

The first time
you took off your clothes
in front of me, you slid
the white fabric of your blouse
off your arms and revealed
the pale ladders
of scars.

You never referenced them
directly. You said you were
lost, once. You said you
did things, once, and you
did them because they
helped you survive yourself.

I didn’t say anything,
but you took my hand
and pressed it to the
ridged rows of your flesh
and for every line you left
upon yourself and healed,
I found another reason
to call you beautiful.

I cannot talk to you right now.

I can’t part my lips
and spill conversations out:
the sentences grow barbs,
my mouth doesn’t work,
my tongue seizes up,
and the words catch.
I am choking on them
and I can’t spit them out.

The only way I can speak
to you is in code.

I have to tell you
that I am growing moth wings,
that the deep blue Atlantic
is writhing under my ribs,
that the butterflies in my stomach
are trying to bite their way out
and I am swallowing bottlesful
of hornets to sting them quiet.

That I have stopped being a man
and have started being a pillar of salt
trying to learn how to rain dance.

That I am eating smoke.

I am trying to tell you something
but I think the cipher is written
on the marrow of my bones
and I don’t want to know
what you’ll need to do
to crack me.