sinking.

my dreams are vivid, though not entirely lucid. this morning the Carolinas sunk into the sea while i floated amongst the waves that licked at shore of my skin. then as the sea swallowed me, he tipped from the ledge of the boat in a splash of water. beneath a backlit black canvas with star-shaped punctures we sunk. but, at least, we sunk together.

sleeping monsters.

sometimes when i speak, i realize it is a hiss of a whisper; a wolf baiting a lamb to wander away from the watchful eye of a shepherd. then sometimes when i speak, there is only empathy and love. it is a dangerous balance of my humanity and the monster buried beneath it; it claws, this monster, for release. i keep it at bay by sheer will and desire to be something bigger than that. i come with only love, it comes with only pain.

keep the monster inside. keep the monster inside. keep the monster inside.

this monster keeps me sick, i cannot destroy it, merely arrest it. for now it sleeps.

pull me out alive.

she carved battlelines in red across her wrists; the skin ruptured and bloomed into something more beautiful than she could ever understand. this was the war of lovers. this was a signal of surrender tucked away into the belly of her white bathroom. but as the world blurred around her in a spin of colors and lights, she realized she had forgotten to say, "i'm sorry."

dirty palms.

I had a dream last night that left me faith-struck and rattled to my bones. God swept His heavenly hands down and carved up the surface of the earth from its roots; instead of ruptured asphalt and spider-web cracked sidewalk we had only his ethereal palms; instead of grass and dirt we had only his holy fingers. Women stomped the sidewalks as if they were catwalks, children ran, played, and skinned their knees, men stalked in slacks and italian leather shoes, and people died; the blood of gangland gods and impartial innocents painted the streets like the great flood that cleansed a sinslick world. I felt ill. Motion sickness from the quiver of His palms; He mourned and his tears swept across our new earth to wash it clean, but...

In the end, His hands were just as dirty as mine.

monster is a relative term.

Emptiness is temporary.

When I have thought about the most disturbing thing in my life, I realized that everyday while I was using was more terror. Everytime I looked in the mirror, I realized that I was empty, and all I saw were tombstones in my eyes. Everyday I asked God to kill me; this was no way to live. But everyday I woke up breathing, everyday I felt the pain that overflowed despite my attempt to bury it beneath a veil of intoxication. It wasn't the days of asking God to kill me that made me accept that I needed change; it was the day that I wished I was alive.

I was the one that felt nothing. I think I possessed the traits of a human with flesh, a beating heart, and cage of bones beneath it all, but there was nothing humane about me. I was cold and cruel, I lacked the one quality that sets decent human beings apart from mass murderers and that's remorse. I was a liar, a thief, a character assassin, but most of all I was my own monster. A monster I created and my addiction perpetuated.

I never want to be like that again. I have no other choice but sobriety.

falling through oblivion; a dream.

I sat on rooftops fishing for angels with my sin as bait. In the belly of the city, however, I caught nothing but gutter goblins and street saviors. I reeled in flocks of fiends, but I always sent them back until I had nothing but a grime-fouled hook swinging like a scythe through the air, tapping Morse code prayers against windowpanes until someone yelled, "Ain't no one gonna save you!" I would have argued had my words not been noosed at the tip of my tongue, or crashed behind the wall of my teeth. I was only able to muster the strenght to wave my palms like white flags to the starry eyes of God. A choir of cupid came in a splash of ethereal light that blinded me and I collapsed to the ground; my fishing pole was dropped and crashed toward the ground like a comet. They sang in dead tongues and burned their imprint along the ladder of my spine, and painted wings across my back in bloodspun burns. A scream rattled around the hollow of my throat, but was swallowed back down with a sudden swell of courage. They gathered me up by the crooked halo of razorwire that hung above my head and cast me into the sky until I was nothing but another star; my ascension into the astral plane was short-lived and once I reached my celestial climax I fell. My limbs burned like the tail of a meteor. Star-gazers watched through the warped lense of a telescope and proclaimed their admiration of such a beautiful rarity.

I burned alone.