I have these voices in my brain and I created them and I hate them, but I ask them to stay. Cause I have this fixation on death, this fixation on change, this fixation on three years I grew out of pain. This fixation on sleep. This fixation on you and on me, but who could I be? I spent three years writing poems about a fixation on the past, and she told me it was worth it, because she told me it would last. But darling, I will hold my tongue as I hold you tight, cause forgetting what you think love means is my sleeping pill every night. I remember when you woke up and screamed “maybe our love is just laced with LSD, because darling, I’m high on life and you’re just high on me.” And as I tried my best to read between the lines, your lips shape words I try to interpret as lies, only to see the devil behind deep inside the details. As Lucifer found his way back into retail, my dear, he sold us a product we didn’t want to buy. But we weren’t trying to be original, we just trying to survive. The voices in my brain telling me it’s all in my head. I will sleep with one eye open but I won’t sleep until I’m dead. Cause a fair assessment of a existence is an inconsistent realist vision of selfish antics reduced to survival of the fittest defined by our ability to avoid those caring any sickness. And these whispers in my head intensify to raspy screams asking when my skull will explode so they can breathe. They know that no one has a voice when no one is listening and the violent riot of staying silent or quiet is torturous to those who need to hear something and that violence has its own sort of beauty. And you are my beauty. And you are my violent smile. And you are my violent prayer. And you’re not my oxygen but I breathe your air. ‘Cause these voices in my brain remind me of past mistakes, the beauty I found of being able to say, “Look what I went through, I survived.” But is survival living or is survival just a placeholder for a vacant mind to cut off the threat to coincide with the soil while their blood boils? ‘Cause my biggest fear was never facing death or even facing what happens after. My biggest fear was never facing anything like that. My biggest fear was waking up in that coffin with all these voices chanting a chorus of remorse, a forced abort from the course I had chosen. And now I’m laying here frozen with fear staring up at a splintering slab of wood paid for with my life savings buried beneath the earth that grew the weeds that poisoned my families feet. What if I woke up and walked back home and it was like nothing had happened? “We left your room the way you left it, we just scrubbed the blood stains out of the carpet, we just rubbed the mud remains out your pockets, we just dubbed the tough claims out of your sonnets. We just evacuated your room and hoped you would too but your spirit haunted it too long so we boarded it up moved along and watched it become a guest room. A place for the non-permanent inhabitants to exist in this home we created to raise our kid.” That was my biggest fear, finding out something like that would happen. ‘Cause the memories have come with this, only cause everything else to hurt deep inside of this dismissed feeling I feel. But sometimes you have to face the past. Maybe I’ve never faced death but if I were to walk away then what would I be? These voices in my head, what would they say and what would they see? Did I survive or am I cursed? Did I die or did I learn? What if I woke up and nothing happened? What if I never wake up? My dear, then what’s my purpose? What if I woke up and nothing happened? And darling, what if you woke up too?