I annihilate. I ash. I terrify.

Clementine von Radics, Sylvia Plath Prays to the House Above Her

i am worried, so worried
for it as well as me
out there, i wonder where he is

who he loves
why he went.

if he still hurts the way we used to.

i asked you once, a long time ago,
to take my organs, bury the rest in salt water

now I wonder if you will find us
at the bottom of the sea
meeting once more
in a haze of blue-green

eerie, ethereal,
seeing dimly, like a mirror,
no faces to be known

we will be voiceless

unrealized.

when I drink like this, and my pulse is slow
and the world goes dark like tinted glass,
it does not hurt at all.

it is as if i never knew someone with eyes
the same brown as my father’s
never sought him in each empty sin,

until the day that i bled him
like ink
from my skin.

i gave him half a year to degrade me.
you can’t say he didn’t make good time.

love is so hard to come by.
i loved, and now i want to die.

how could this happen,
how could it ever?

do you remember any of it? 

once upon a long nightmare, I burned myself.
now I am ready to burn anything.

starting with our photographs.

ending with the world. 

this how I live.
irredeemable. beyond health.

i am your inpatient miracle
your clinical subject
your dormant psychosis
your obedient nightmare
you hate me because i am you

 i never wanted to be this.

i wanted to be simple and good
not waiting for my heart to give out, or my lungs to collapse,
or my liver to scream through my skin.

i wanted to be small.

how can you sleep at night? or at all?

something is wrong so deep inside of me that it is probably never coming out.

so feel your heart break. try again.

kane
wallace
woolf
plath

did not kill themselves,
the world killed them.

will kill me if i let it. i won’t.
i understand.

know this in full.
the wound is cauterized, sealed.
open no longer, no part of me is:

closed off like an iris,
i healed.

i won’t do it again. not ever. for health

i’ll be something else
i’ll not be myself.

mars is in retrograde. so am i
the moon is new, and clean, unearthed.
my heart is unearthly

i writhe.

if you tore me open with fingernails now,
your shame would wrench cold stars from the sky.

the night is effaced.
i feel faceless, alive.

i am ready to gnaw my history to a pulse.
to die alone in a burning fall

because i died for love
and so i died for nothing–

yes, i died for nothing at all.