Owen's Poetry Archive

if feelings were fluids

on the days when melancholy
coats the inside of your abdomen
like a thick vapor clinging to your chest
somewhere deep that you can't reach
it feels blue but you know
if you could see it
it would be frighteningly clear
like the doctors office with a shot
and a scrape full of iodine
and a chemical that burns like yesterday

when your head aches with pressure
skull crowded by spirals of negative self speech
bone threatening to break and crack
because it isn't as strong as you thought
and it's no match for the sulci of that pink flesh that goes so deep
like a low point with murky water
cresting the dark forest

the valleys of that organ that
produce dead bogs and decaying trees
that evaporate and transpire that crystal
clear ache that turns
to a burn when you contemplate it
and it links with the past

you know its different from the unusual usual ache of stress
an ache of electricity
that brings you life,
because it feels so close to death
and nighttime thunderstorms
and a crackling lightning that
dessimates anything you called alive

and your lungs
possibly the most effected, your respiration, your force of life
alveolar sacs meant to enrich you
with oxygen to fire your fierce form
they drown in a nothing
that feels so much like an everything
that you can't figure out if you're suffocating
because you lack air
or if you can't breathe because
there is so much everything
and no way to process it
as it pounds and inflates your lungs
so much that they could pop
and with a violent shudder
you would vanish from this world
to nowhere

neurons that used to remind you of your mothers cookies
the crook of that sidewalk girl's nose
the smell of tomato leaves
and the taste of vegetable stew when everyone was happy
or faked it

now they are just the shape of what they were, shells
just strings desperate to become electric
yarn yearning to be plastic or metal
so that you may be perfectly manufactured
by nature
a machine of feeling

but they just sit there no longer
firing any emotion that made you want this
and in the in between you realize
the worst hurt that you could feel
was not leaving the hurt
was not being in the hurt
but being imprisoned in the hurt as
your body reacted
with its mortal martyr shell thoughts
and told you that you weren't a robot