the bleakest of courage is still courage.

so i learn again, to not shed tears in front of the world

for the poorest part of my soul

because i should appreciate the sun

and watch it glow even though

it hurts my eyes, strain my neck and

burn the forefront of my thoughts that are striving to be seen

under the overpowering glare of the big star of hope.

the world is blind to what i have to offer

with my nothing and everything.

it is the beginning of something that i 

spend days hiding under the covers from,

and now i watch it open slowly,

then rapidly, growing,

like the earthquakes they never expected 

until next month.

the days settle like flour,

thick and tasteless, like the texture

of my mind, like the depths of my eyes when i catch my reflection.

i believe you mean the best

and nothing less, when you push me off the cliff of my emotions,

so i can learn to claw at the rocks, to want,

to live,

to survive the abyss you have caught me looking down at

over and over,

but i wasn’t ready for the push

when i had leaned backwards

into your support.

i dangle, at the edge of the world,

and i cannot say i am scared anymore

for i do not dare for anyone to listen anymore

because well, it’s just a fucking scary situation isn’t it?

so deal with it.

learn to be happy, in your own ways,

in your old ways,

in the ways that killed you and brought you back to life,

learn it, breathe it, live it, cherish it.

this happiness,

spoken of like a myth, like

a powerful spell, is here

under my grip,

but if i clench any tighter,

i will watch it erupt and disintegrate,

so i have to learn to hold on loosely

and adapt.

i wish you could understand that

behind my moulding, decaying walls that everybody claim is made of steel

i also protect this parcel of pain weighing me down on my other hand

for i cannot leave something that is made of glass

purely to gravity.

so i learn again to build the walls

and not say a word.

i sing silly songs to drown the discord of my heart breaking,

and despite the ache of knowing everybody would rather 

fix the fixable and

shy away from the one that truly need it,

i forgive them, and turn to silence too,

like them, 

for i understand why they’d rather listen to the easier answers

to their accidentally profound questions.

How are you?

i am ephemeral, impermanent, transcendental

and alive.

suddenly,

everybody are strangers

so i decide to connect with the

effervescence of the moon and step in its craters,

for the strangers point and gaze from all of the world, in togetherness,

with the knowledge that they will

never be able to touch it.

but you touched me.

you are my astronaut, my spaceman,

but maybe it is time you yearned to

take flight from this lonely orbit?

i can make things right,

but it is time and nothing else,

that is so precious to me,

but keeps being pulled away from under my stand when i 

find some balance again.

i freefall,

fast and wild,

into the gush of self-repairment,

because i have to,

for who?

because i have to,

for who?

because i have to,

for who?

for you?

for me?

for her?

for him?

when i just really want to, 

find time,

to want to,

for myself.

what is this world for

and what is my excuse for being alive?

what is yours?

and yours?

and yours?

all i ask for is time

but the world keeps turning

but they all keep turning

but you keep turning

around

and

away

around

and

away

around

and

away.

all i ask for is time,

in an impatient world.

i remember the beautiful days

when the sun kissed your hair

and lived in your eyes,

the way you looked at me.

i remember the beautiful days

when you promised me

all of what i now only

occasionally see,

when you rested your mind on the curve of my thigh.

i remember the beautiful days

when i listened to our heartbeats

come together under your skin

as i fell asleep on your chest,

bare, just for me.

i remember the beautiful days

when i could shed my skin and bones

and still feel like the queen of your heart.

i remember it all,

and want so much for you to find the trust you

and the world have lost in me,

because my excuse to be alive,

is that things that are broken

can always find pieces that fit.

alone with a blanket

nights like these,
thick and deserted, live eyes that are
wide, manic, desperate, 
with hands in the pupils, clawing out for a salvation that is
sorely out of sight.

nights like these, 
cold and disgraceful, live lips now parched,
lined with dried blood. nights like
these,
where skin off my face reside
dead beneath my frantically bitten nails.

nights like these,
impulsive and raw, lives I,
who lie on floors to etch closer to gravity’s
pull, yearning, pleading for its grasp, 
to plunge me down through these
layers and layers of life,
of cement, of plaster, until i hit the ground
and shatter,
along with the wreckage i caused along the way,
until i feel nothing.
nothing.

nothing.

then nothing can shake me.

it is nights like these,
sad and heavy,
when even the moon cannot shed light
on a soul like mine,
blackened with fear,
contaminated with madness.

the curtains are closed.

i am mad, i think? i think i am mad.

nights like these,
when i contemplate on the unforgivable,
and wonder if that son of a bitch
really wasn’t a son of a bitch,
and if i were in his skin, behind his eyes, inside his head,
i would’ve abused me, too,

yes. 
i would hit myself, too, i would kick myself, too,
i would spit at myself, too,
i would throw myself to the floor and knee myself in places that cannot heal, too
because aren’t i just one colossal show reel of the best nightmares?

and who’d want nightmares
when they can choose between good dreams or sleeping pills or drugs or death or anything else that 
stops you
from having nightmares?

nights like these,
deaf and blind,
when it becomes clear to me
that the happiness i seek
is always inside me,
but i have just chosen to look the other way and

blame the world for what i am doing to myself.

blindspot.

these times are hard.

i lose grip of my thoughts

shaking in viral, contagious despair

in a locked room where white walls and crumpled clothes leer at me

because i have so much more to prove, yet there i stay

in the mockery, in the humiliation until i can

find a sane expression to sew onto my face

for i cannot afford to shed anymore tears

in a world full of rain.

i am the tension of guitar strings,

the sharp edge of broken glass.

i bite back works so carefully strung

until i unravel and say the words i meant to keep in the middle, unheard, unnoticed.

these times are hard,

and the days grow old and increasingly intense.

my conscience could be clear,

but can anybody really live with such transparency?

it is dark, where my mind lingers,

and i fear that i have grown weaker 

in the ability to find the light that is pitifully

flickering out from the centre of me.

i have so much yearn for happiness,

so much yearn that it aches, that it cuts me in places even you, my love,

cannot reach.

i have so much yearn

for the person i used to greet in the mirror,

for the person you fell in love with,

for the person that carried a different voice,

a different spirit, a different skin,

for the person i was proud to be, for just a while.

now i only try, and keep trying, and keep trying so hard 

- at what?

i disappear into a box

when i hate everything about myself and

i hate everything about the pain i feel

and i hate everything about the tears i shed and how i look and how i sound and how i think and fucking breathe.

in this box lives my passion, my sorrows, and my strengths. 

it is here where i am most free, because i don’t need to prove any fucking thing

to any fucking one.

these are hard times.

there was another hard time when i was

fragile to their eyes,

kept in a box of my mother’s regrets,

dangling in the forefront of my father’s worries,

clawing out from within the ache of my sister’s

long buried pain.

now i am fragile and fraying

to my own eyes,

and i feel it.

it throttles me, hard and strong like the waves of an angry

vengeful ocean,

my denial runs dry like cold earth, 

my strengths - or faux-strengths -beaten down,

reminding me that there is somebody

inside

that craves the attention of a better world.

“these are dark days, Jarrod”

i say to an old friend who had played witness to

once upon a time,

when a poor attempt of a man painted sadness into my eyes

and froze it in place.

now the thawing begins, and oh,

it hurts.

i wonder when i last shrugged at the world,

scorned at the disasters it served me on a platter, and cannot remember

when i had last gambled my guilt for freedom,

because it is hard to gamble your guilt when you hurt

the ones you love in this process of self-centring. 

so i choose to stop centring myself,

putting myself off like the least likeable chore of the day,

a with this begins the disintegration of my entire being.

the night grew,

expanding and showing me a glimpse of infinity.

i am scared, my love.

i fear for the skies,

i fear for the earth,

i fear for the hours i am losing in the

bundle of my teardrops and the pull of my thoughts,

so wretched

so testing.

i am scared of forgetting what it is like to live.

but i cannot burden anybody with these fears of mine

except a man on a couch who tries to look into my soul,

or whatever is left of it.

i am scared, my love.

i am sad like the hole in our wall,

grey like the city we roam,

too heavy to move,

too stubborn to let go yet

too fragile to fix but

too eager to merely fade away -

so i drift.

oh, it hurts,

to hold so much pain, to handle so much energies that is beyond this body cradling me.

oh, it hurts,

to search for the happiness i know so well.