if you tie hopes to me, i get tired, i feel guilty. i worry about not being everything, i stress about disappointment and not holding on. i hold on tight. litter me with small awarenesses, and i will ask if i'm good enough. every one. every time. there are things that drift away. what happens when i choose to believe? sailing ships. bodies. choose where to be. misplaced. i can't recall. tucked in winter, fragile, doll.
just sweet, is it, mostly. be deep in my deep places, hot where i'm hot, and hot where i'm cold. love my hands, love the way my middle finger and my ring finger on my right hand bow into each other, gapped in the middle but the nails leaning in, conspiring, from so many nights when i have fallen asleep while writing in my notebooks, from everything i've ever drawn. love this hand i have grown specifically to hold expression and unravel myself to the world in long black strands and hard, bright colors. love my hands, my hand, because it is all of me, and it will be good for you. sweet. don't look at me with anything but adoration. i am well-versed in the language of eyes, i might as well be psychic, i know what you think, even when you don't say it. don't don't say the things that hurt me, don't let me reread my own fears and doubts in eyes, familiar and so old. bone-chillingly ancient, petrified, brittle, hard as failure, as hard as all of my sad songs.
i take care of things, fix them, volunteer, distract. i'm scared to run into a quiet moment and realize no one is caring back. i bleed myself dry and then look around helplessly for a transfusion, or run, because i'm too ashamed to ask for one. i do this, i'm bad at it. change me. all of my sad songs can't make me change, they'll just keep pushing you further away. the great regret is staying in place. i just want something to be safe and naked in, without being catatonic, or dead, to get there.
at the end of my day, when i'm called to go into open arms, let fortune follow me. i'm running low, the devil is on my trail. when fate delivers me, all i'll ask it for is a place to rest, and shelter for my soul. oh if i could spend my days free from the prison of your gaze. if i could spend my day free from the shadow of my name... god, just know when i'm being me, and when i'm spouting lyrics and other lines because i'm too damn scared to trust my own weak way of wording things. it is weak, these days. and that just wrenches me through, wrings me out and leaves me shaking and cold on a tight line. my days are so full of monotony, of brainless, brawny work, and i feel myself crumbling internally. like play-doh, slowly drying out in a dark closet, shrinking, pulling away from the sides of the container, getting small and hard. i don't want to be a small, hard, shrunken person.
i'm gunshy and quivering, timid, feigning brave, brittle and hardly here.
not much makes sense. i'm faking it. pseudo-making it. beginning the middle of something again, buried neck-deep in sand waiting for it to unbury me. the salt-water is suffocating, i can't breathe. it beats me, unrelenting. you should see what it's doing to my hair.
like andromeda, nothing listens, no one calls. and here i am, awake, alone, living on a chain. even these wordlinks clatter hollow. oh, the nothingness that holds me is so profound.
and now the final refrain. played out by the band. self-professed, profound, the chips are down. though you're a gamblin' man, love... is a losing hand, a fate resigned over futile odds. laughed at by the gods. another link in the chain.
i should be better at leaving you alone, i wish i could. should be more normal, less creepy and clinging. yeah... andromeda. we wish we were islands. i believe in the things you say during sleep. too bad i can't hear them. all by myself, chained to this wet rock.
pack these suckers tight, i should walk on water.
