I thought I saw my dreams ending, crushed on the pavement, blood and teeth as souvenirs for the passers on the street.
But the overpass was reinforced by engineers and knew it was just tall enough to look dangerous, but like heroine and priests, dangerous things don’t always kill you.
I’m a fan of the death march, walking around like you’re alive, but knowing you don’t care about anything, and the things you do care about, you wish you didn’t. I dyed the color of my hair once. I stared at it in the mirror, really trying to care. Then I shaved my head.
You’d defriend someone who taunted you. You’d throw out a piece of art that lost its meaning. You’d delete that crap album before it played again during your endless stream of whatever through your headphones. Because you remove the things that bother you. So I want to remove myself.
A lobotomy just won’t do it. I can’t suffer knowing I’m still alive. How selfish, you would say. To kill yourself. I know that’s what my mother would say. What about the people you leave behind? To them I say, I needed death. You need therapy and pills and talking over coffee about nothing at all, dreaming your sweet dreams and waking up to birds on the windowsill, your hand rubbing your cock, the smile on your face at a brand new day.
It’s all fucking terrible to me.
Every night I pray to you
To give me sleep
To give me love
Every morning I wake up
Still dead in here
Still dead in there
Every day I walk around
Staring at these walls
Staring at these eyes
In 2007, a British man charged with the rape of a 10-year-old girl was given concurrent two-year and 18-month jail sentences, as opposed to life in prison. The judge felt he was faced with “a moral dilemma” in this “exceptional case” because the victim regularly wore make-up, strappy tops and jeans, making her appear at least 16 years old — as though somehow her provocative clothing trumped her right to consent — assuming a child is even capable of consent.
Cases like the above aren’t isolated anomalies in our legal systems. Rape cases are thrown out on the basis of the victim’s appearance — how they dress, act and speak — while instances of sexual harassment in the workplace are overlooked because of the victim’s sexual history. Women are constantly written off by their peers as worthless, irrelevant and less capable at the simple utterance of that four-letter word.
The word slut has become a catch-all phrase used to defame a woman — one that has lost its meaning in society, while simultaneously carrying dark implications with its use.
And then suddenly knowing full well what I had done,
The screams I touched myself to,
The sound of flesh being broken,
The sound of meat beating against meat,
Anguish, ravenous, weakness,
The full swarm of rape, raping, raped,
Until desensitized, craving more,
Craving to see the younger image,
Craving to see the part of me,
Peeled back from the sheets,
Torn open and bleeding,
Bleeding until dead, alive, still shining eyes.
The images don’t stop,
Long after flesh gone, gone for a long time now,
Dreaming the nightmare,
And waking up to find yourself safe,
And knowing fully well,
What you came up with while dreaming,
Peering inside your great mind,
Asleep, locked inside a pendulum room,
And no one else knows,
No one else knows.
_______________________
I slept for years in my twenties,
Wrapped up in blankets,
Boxed in by pillows,
Cushioned yet not comforted,
I thought of death,
I thought of darkness,
I thought of demons and God,
of my mother, of my friends,
I thought of myself, my Cat,
my future children, my future lover,
And wave upon wave of shells,
Burying me down in the sand,
Bloodied by my open head,
I saw my life, ending,
I saw the life my mother created,
Passing into the ocean,
And I know I hurt you mother,
But I hurt you more in what I do to myself.
