things we do to damage ourselves

   put your head between the two speakers & lay upside down so your organs can slide back, loud as you can
   hold the knife blade in, but gently
   never quit
   never quit
   never quit
   take drugs that half the time urge you to kill yourself
   tell your friends you want to kill yourself
   let music & only music hold you
   lament the past efficiently
   get pleasure from tears
   destroy yourself for crying
   give up
   forget someone you thought you'd love forever (a celebration in this like your very last birthday maybe)
   starve
   stay up
   fall in love with your own heartbeat
   let your own heartbeat drown the world out
   isolate yourself in you, as if you're the best hiding place
   dislocate
   disavow
   distrust
   promise
   expect
   forget why you came, pretending you never intended to
   keep your heart a secret
   keep your brain in your throat
   keep your mirror as a pet
   wish
   hope
   look behind you with watery eyes
   call the best poem you've ever written a tear-stained page in a diary
   forget your own beauty
   call yourself a genius
   call yourself a retard
   kiss anyone who holds your hand
   make truth out of whatevers
   say I don't know
   tell someone that you do, and they won't
   watch yourself go
   write bad poems
   thinking they're like a bath
   thinking they're just words
   try
   stone face smiling
   ignore
   revenge

wash

I first practiced devastation when I was six, it was a devastation determined by a crushing guilt. I would run a bath and sit in the pink bathroom waiting for the tub to fill, and the roar of the rushing water would ring my ears like two speakers switching on back and forth. I thought I was going deaf, I was deaf, I thought I could hear so well that the sound was damaging me. And during these moments my heart would rise up to deafen and I would feel the anxiety building and I would become weak and fall into a rush of panic, which I interpreted as guilt. Capital Guilt. I would try to calm down, sit on the edge of the tub, and would eventually decide that I'd have to stop the water from filling the tub so much. It was all I could stand. Before I learned that I had to stop the water, that I had to sit in a tub that would barely cover my legs, I'd run out of the bathroom to find my parents to admit something to them. I'd tell them only one thing that I'd done wrong. It usually had to do with saying the word asshole or pretending to fuck one of my friends. They'd shake their heads, confused, trying to stop my sob panic, assuring me that what I'd done wasn't so bad, really. I've never understood why I had such a debilitating guilt complex, I was only ever told to treat people well & to not lie to my parents. It was because I had secrets, and that to me meant I was a liar. Keeping a secret isn't telling a lie. Keeping is holding, knowing, treasuring, being inside of a self. Telling is exposing, pushing, forcing, demanding, active & obtrusive. But keeping can also be taking, stealing, and telling can be truthful & necessary & helpful. I'd like to hold & give over & over forever, but the feeling still shakes me away sometimes. I quit admitting, though. I haven't enough faith in that.

the cat barks at the no-see-ums

I flipped a switch of ghost, liking the term of a dirty switch and grabbing hold of it to self-entitle. Cocoa butter, a roll of toilet paper. A french press copper ashtray jar of lavender stems a bottle of black ink.

Get lost in the moss. My little stone's throw from a battering brook, a beating from that wayside burble, stones (like I) tossed in and out of tiny wakes. Buried bruised in sparkling pink of bath.

References made shatterable, from rhyme 

unravelling ribbon, spells outcast

my imploding pink sheath.

in about two minutes

I will bathe. I made list of the people I've seen, or those spoken to over the telephone.

I bathed. My hair, in similar shades. I swear I'll stop this, I know that it could be anywhere I do all this, but not for long, for weekly trips mandatory to the beach are in my future. Thursday... I have to wait, but oh what a wait then, and I...