I walk Berkeley streets doused in rainfall, mindless from spreading the last pieces of my mutilated brain onto a vandalized wooden table like I shot myself right there with a double barrel shotgun –– I stare ahead and see nothing.
Alleyways pass by me, a cross shines in dark red above.
My feet are moving as if on their own, as if separated from my thoughts.
The thoughts they circle around insecurities like great whites in hunt, like rabbits that mate with their heads down in heat; I like it rough when I’m getting bad again.
In the warmth of my mouth the maggots find their safe havens, in the bowling alley parking lot I find my ecstasy dressed in black, on the linoleum I find the slamming of hips, of lips bleeding and swelling, of moths swallowing the rot for me; in the shadowed corners of my brain there are piles of empty and deranged thoughts piling dust, it only takes a gust of wind for it to spread towards the synapses and spark a fire.
My mind fosters dust and blackness—when I look into the stars and see nothing I am reminded of home.
Holding my gaze up into the violet vastness, a thought dances across my eyes: is there such a thing as a misfired star? In the combustion of dust that creates the bodies of gas I see flicker across the sky, have there been moments where it does not come to its full completion, where it bloats and then falls flat and motionless? Is this scenario like the empty thoughts that hoard in my mind, the ones that I do not pay mind to? Is a failed star merely an intrusive thought in this instance?
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Do I start with the ones that float across my frontal lobe or do I focus on the ones that pierce through soft tissue like the swiss-army knives lodged into my amygdala?; the ones that drain fluid out of my brain and into the IV drips somebody’s mother was given when she ate one too many antipsychotics and closed her eyes on the toilet?; the ones that cry and scream Do it, what’s the use? when I am weak and suffering on my knees, worshiping to God that my body didn’t dissolve it, that my stomach didn’t eat it, that I could be anything worth something.
As I lurch over the toilet seat I am not a religious person, I am only afraid.
Oftentimes, I like to ignore intrusive thoughts. I like to punish them by smothering them in jasmine tea and amphetamines. I would like to let them realize that they are only thoughts, merely fired synapses left to fizzle out; they are the micro lightning bolts that click in my brain like a camera shutter. I will not provide black and white paintings for scenes that will never know how to look like anything but eccentric possibilities and the color fuschia. I won’t separate the variations of my thoughts into binaries, because my brain is not a code, or a petri dish to try and experiment with what medications work, what diagnoses I have; because I am a living phenomenon of recycled dust that looks at the tops of trees for eagle nests and stares so long at the open night sky that I trip on jagged concrete and shattered glass;
because I am a person with flesh on my skeleton that I want to itch (I will use the isolated razer from the pencil sharpener if I have to);
because it never felt good to slap myself across the face and scream into the sink until I came in contact with cocaine, alcohol, and obsessive infatuation;
because I have been a broken person before, because there is suffering in the oceans of my eyes;
because despite my body being dragged through the desert and scrubbed raw, I still have my moments of weakness where I am not just the nice things about myself;
because I am the fucking rot too.
It rests deep inside me, somewhere I have forgotten because I tied those bricks tightly and let my blackness drown.
Even in my writing I smother it in heavy down pillows. I feel confined to suffocate in a room without space for the authentic self, the failed lover, or the fallen angel.
There is an endorsed idea to always look for the rainbow at the sight of a rainy day, to see the good even in the bad, to write about shit I have an opinion on only for the sake of spreading the opinion, for the sake of being right, for the sake of being God.
