Time to time, I strain my eyes
Because everywhere I look are zombies
And they’re all out to get me,
With their fevered gaze set before my direction
Snarling and clawing
With arms outstretched for me even as their flesh tears
But I watch them in comfort
As they cry and flail against a wall of glass
And I shut the blinds and turn away in shame.
Those were dreams of mine I’d let die,
So how could they still believe in me?
Semblances of consciousness more dead than alive
Affixed in a limbo grown more persistent
As if these hands that tremble now
Wield in them the courage to inspire pumping blood
In their veins, but I’ve lost the heart awhile ago.
I’m surrounded.
There’s nowhere to go.
A sea of filth sends forth a wave of defeat
Like a crushing blow and suddenly it smells
Of tooth decay and withered bones.
It’s in these moments of disruption
When the static in my head goes quiet
That suddenly I can hear outside:
Screams then acquiescence.
I peer through the blinds
And see they’ve retreated back into their graves.
That makes sense.
It’s the middle of the day and the sun is out.
It’s in the crystal glare of a lake that I find myself
Mumbling something preposterous
So I cast stones to summon another likeness,
A version more accurate, more defined
In distortion
And through ripples,
I pull myself in.
When I awake,
It’s still sunny outside and
There’s millipedes in the grass.
Departed triumphs scatter at my feet;
These were dreams of mine too.
I pick one up and it becomes a dried out husk.
But it’s not a loss
When there’s plenty more to replace it.
Soon they’re all dried up
And I feel the accumulation of tiny souls weigh on me,
At least for a moment
But it’s the evening now and the sun is setting.
It’s time to go.
I close my eyes and hope to be encased
In a cocoon.
I want tomorrow to be several weeks from now
And the future to appear brighter
As if I’ll be reborn as something beautiful
Instead of choking on my own silk.
These are the words I wrote in hopes
It’d somehow free me from myself,
As if I was the cocoon
And my potential was the thing it held captive
But when I open my eyes,
I’m staring into a glass wall
That’s staring back at me.
Nothing’s changed,
But that’s okay too.
That’s only on the surface.
I’m everything I ever wanted to be.
A conqueror, a despot, a cocoon,
A necromancer, a bugcatcher, ripples on a lake,
A fistful of clay, a broken clock, a shattered mirror.
I let the glass crack and numerous hands burst from the earth
And I finally surrender myself to fate.
I’m torn from limb to limb
But my last thoughts are that of
Becoming
A man who learns how to forgive himself.
They take my everything and replace it with parts of theirs.
My left knee is from the 5th grade on the last day of school
And there’s a bloody scrape from when I jumped and fell on it
For the third consecutive year.
I wondered how it would happen again next year.
My right hand is from the 3rd grade when I had to relearn how to hold a pencil
Because no one really knew how I was doing what I was doing
And I didn’t either
Though my penmanship still never improved.
My eyes are from the 7th grade
When I finally admitted I could barely see
And my mom lent me a pair of contacts
And suddenly it made sense why people don’t sit
In front of the TV or wonder how they missed a spot while cleaning the toilet.
I spent half my life blind and the other half half-blind.
My stomach is from my last year of college
When I would come home to meals
She made for me
Full of her love
And I’d stuff myself but I’d always forget to savor it,
And I don’t know which flavor I neglected more:
The food or hers.
My brain is full of every moment, every thought, every dream
That went abandoned or long forgotten.
I am an amalgamation of every experience I’ve ever had or imagined to have.
With a groan, the last zombie sews itself into my heart
And it’s night now.
The moon is full and lustrous
And its light bleeds onto the shards of glass.
Through those shards, I take a look at myself
And find I’m still me.
But that’s only on the surface.
An indelible imprint has been left on my soul.
I see me, I recognize me, I embrace me.
I cannot change out of rejection for myself.
I must be tender, I want to persist,
I want to be THIS,
I can’t just be THAT.
I leave the glass shards on the ground
And start to walk
And I trust I’ll know when I’ve arrived
As I start listening to my thoughts,
Parsing through each one and
I hope the reductionist in me spares me
At least for tonight.
I’m tired
But there’s still time to rest.
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