furthermore

Introspection

I consider this poem my magnum opus, and as such, it is still evolving and will be edited continuously.

I want to wake up from this nightmare
Of silence and dread
I want the sun to rise on a happier place
Where the floor isn't made of paper
I want to do things I enjoy
And make money from them
Instead of plucking pennies
From the repeated words of another
And hoping I can build armor from them
Sometimes
We spend so much time in the shadows
That we forget
The world isn't all dark corners
and shady alleyways
There is light
There must be
If there is so much darkness
My brain was built for self-destruction,
To run the same piece of code
Over and over, on a loop,
Until it burns itself out
And pops like a light bulb
I grew into my bones the way
Air inflates the lungs,
Filling up all the empty spaces,
Or the way water will always, always
Find a way to flow downhill
But unlike either, my process was slow,
Like a river cutting out its canyon,
One grain at a time
My bones have never felt
Like they were meant for
The body they inhabit
And my skin feels foreign to the touch
Like the sensation my fingers expect
Is cold and smooth
And not warm or rough
There are days when I wake from dreams
That feel more real than my bed
And whose memory echoes
Down the corridors of my mind
Like a scream
Or a whisper of the wind
My house's foundation is cracked
The floors are sagging
And the shutters rattle
In the slightest breeze
I am held together
By staples and band-aids
I don't belong here
I long to go home
To a place that no longer exists
Except in the foggy backlands
Of rapidly-fading memory
Looking at photographs of my childhood
I recognize that she is me
But I do not see myself reflected
In those piercing blue-grey eyes
I did not know myself then
I could never dream myself into becoming
The adult that stands now
Looking into childhood's eyes
And searching for clarity
I could not fathom the pain
That has been stitched into my skin
Or the loss that hollows the place
Behind my eyes
That little girl has never been unmoored
And desperate for a port to dock in
She does not yet know
That the clay can be reshaped
No matter how cold and hard it begins
If only I could reclaim
The casual innocence in her smile
And for a moment become her again
The hours are winding down
The seconds spinning out
Like the arms of a galaxy
Every loose end is tied up
In a neat little bow
But every thread that's pulled taut
Unravels another somewhere else
I'm bad luck.
I'm reminded of the Butterfly Effect,
Starring Ashton Kutcher
Where the only way to save the girl
Is to go all the way back
And strangle himself in utero
My mind conjures this image
Whenever I think about how
Everyone I have ever known
Has suffered after meeting me
I'm bad luck.
When things line up and go well for me
They fall apart for those around me
And it's hard not to see the correlation
Would you be better off
Having never met me?
I'm bad luck.
I am an unmanned boat
Knocking listlessly against the dock
Unmoored, untied, nominally free
Is this my port of call?
The water rises
The water falls
Looking closer, I am not a boat at all
I am a coffin, containing the bones
Of a life I no longer lead
I am a time capsule
Do not open until
I am a bit of plastic
Floating on the tide
I was never made for the sea
Mine was meant to be a gentler life
But here I am, wave-tossed, sand-scoured,
All my sharp edges curved until
I am no longer recognizable in the wreckage
Just so much flotsam
In an endless ocean
I see myself a bit like
An archeological dig
My bones uncovered
Painstaking inches at a time
I am in the shape of a person
Mostly
But the angles are all wrong
And as the scientists dig me out
They discover that I am not human after all
But some ancient, alien subspecies
They're both intrigued and horrified
There's a high turnover rate at this dig
Nobody wants to put their name
To my discovery
I am static
The sound of rushing water
I fill the void of silence with myself
I am an empty page
Dog-eared
Where once someone wished to write
I can't relate to emotion
I try to match my edges to
The tears in others' pages
But I cannot feel them
I sympathize
But I can't empathize
I don't feel human
I don't feel same enough
To echo the way others feel
I am a mirror that cannot reflect
There is nothing in me
But a little bit of polyfill
And some styrofoam beads
I don't even feel alive
I am the walking dead
I have been an ambulatory corpse
These last 10 years
Lost and alone
In a world I am unequipped for
I am a semi-functional android
Whose internal processes
Are slowly becoming obsolete
And whose software
Is painfully out of date
Would you like to update
Your operating system?
You are incompatible with the update
Please purchase the newest model
And try again
I am scrap metal
I am nothing
I have ripped my cords out of the wall
And now lie, only partially functional
On the floor of a room
I never dreamed myself in
I feel like a paper boat
Slowly soaking in the river water
Slowly drowning
Slowly, slowly
I think I understand now
The motivation behind Mono
Life is a rat race
We need to slow down
And remember what it was like
To be human, together
And not these lonesome husks
Clinging to the tree bark
Like cicada shells
There are words trapped inside of me
Beating at the bars of my ribcage
Like a flock of frenzied birds
Or a swarm of hornets
They are screaming inside my head
A jumbled word salad
Not fit for consumption
If I could pin their wings
And make them stay still
I could say them aloud
And let them out of my body
So that they could fly free
If I could capture them like ladybugs
I could grind their shells into ink
And write them out onto a page
Where someone outside of myself
Could be burdened with the weight of them
I am tired of having the words to say
Without the cypher to decode them
Into a format palatable to another
If I could open a vein
And pour these words directly
Into the mouths of others
I would sell them by the ounce
I cannot bear these hidden, jumbled words
That cry out for freedom
From a prison with no lock
And no discernable exit
How do you die without
Actually being dead?
Because I've no greater goal in life
I am blue, in shades and tones
Fading in and out of saturation
Sometimes I forget
How important it is to be alone
Without allowing the
Oily darkness of loneliness
To seep into your bones
And chill you from within
I find solace in music
That has nothing at all to do
With the emotions warring within me
It distracts me
From black thoughts
That whisper about death
My tethers have been unclipped
From other celestial bodies
And I find myself forced
To remember that
Solitude is a vacuum
And losing my hold
Will not mean the end of me
But an endless, spiraling beginning
I turn the page after these epilogues
And find a new chapter one
For someone else
With the space between
For rediscovering myself