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.