I Can Feel It

I can feel it in my bones, this heavy sagging feeling; like they are filled with lead; like the blood in my veins is mercury, something deadly, but beautiful to watch. A poison has crept inside every my every pore destroying nearly all the humanity I had left. That poison is the circumstances of my life. Every trauma and disappointment has layered itself so thickly I can relate to the felling of suffocation that the canvasses of Jackson Pollock's paintings must have felt. Every splatter, every brush stroke like the lash of a hot single tail whip, brought down on virgin soft skin; splitting it open until it is only a maze of tingling scar tissue.

Give me a new name; I am your broken slave.

I walk about wide eyed, tracking for some beauty to hold onto, something to make me feel alive. But all I can see are the same muted colors, the volume dial is tuned down so low I barely recognize when someone is speaking to me anymore. Help me; I don't know what I've become. Half dead but still animated my soul can't even feel the rays of a full moon anymore, can't stand in the sunshine, its warmth is not enough to feel through this thickened skin. I can't sleep, and when it takes me in fits, I can't dream anymore. I rise exhausted and wonder what I woke up for. I go through the motions of my everyday life, brushing my teeth too hard just to feel the sensation of bleeding gums. I go for days without showering, without cleaning myself up, too angry to put on a "pretty face" any longer.

I need to feel again, to know I am alive and not some walking corpse. I need to recognize my own soul again when I look myself in the eye through a silver piece of glass. But it doesn't come in doses long enough to seem real. My reality is fractured and the stale recycled air in the file room I spend my days in, shuffling about doing the mundane and pointless tasks, drowns out even the sound of my inner voice. I live in the uncomfortable silence of muffled corporate phone calls and the static hum of fluorescent lights. I heave boxes from shelves and sort through files; slicing the thin skin on my fingers in invisible whispers they call paper cuts.

I hear voices in the back of my head, but they aren't "mine."

They talk about leaving, just walking out, getting in my car and driving away. They talk about how I only really feel alive anymore when I'm doing something destructive. When I'm close to death, I can feel m heart beating in my chest. But even death is a plaything I've grown tired of. I've been there so many times already, not even the promise of that empty black void holds any allure to me. It wouldn't be so different than how I feel now. There is ink on my hands as I write this, I push it around to make sure it real, that I still have hands to stain, and it spreads in feathered streaks-looking like little green comets smudging against a pale pink sky.

How do I feel again?

Someone show me something that is real and beautiful, something I can understand; because this place isn't real and it robs pieces of me everyday.

Packed into all the tiny cracks between the endless boxes and the thin spaces of air between each file is the sight of my coffin. It is killing me off and I stare it right in the face, shoulders sagging.

Come on then, do your worst, there's not much left to take from me anymore. And as numb as I am, I am awash with emotions every moment. Intense but so fleeting, the emotion only has time to register, and then it is gone. Except the anger, the anger is always with me, just beneath the surface, it begs for any excuse to explode. The rage and the void are so strong they must be the same, like conjoined twins, only they speak from the same mouth. As soon as I feel, any scrap of happiness or warmth, love or beauty, hope or laughter, it is smothered by a wet blanket made of woven concrete and steel. My heart is trapped in quicksand inside my chest, drawing itself deeper into the thickness of wet sand with every pulsing beat.

Stop, someone throw me a line, I want to get back but I'm afraid of the sound of next shoe dropping; the next lame denial, the next heartbreak, the next flicker of hope tamped out by the harsh realities of this world. Keep me locked away in a frozen state.

And my thoughts turn to you. Fuck you. For showing up here when I was finally comfortable not feeling anything at all. You brought those emotions to the surface with just your words; just your beautiful and inspiring words that haunt me, reminding me of what it is to feel again. Fuck you. For being so grotesques and so gorgeous in the same instant. Fuck you. For being optimistic, for being godless and still having faith. You incense me, but only because I know no matter how cold and calloused I've become, I welcome the destruction you will leave in your wake. Go on; break what's left of my heart, such a tiny silver it hardly matters. Like the rest, I know, you are not meant for me.

But I, I am meant to give you something.

That much has been made clear, I am meant to give you something we can't begin to imagine fully yet. You are right. I have so much to teach you, I will try to make the lessons brief; maybe not for my safety but yours. You were right; there was never any caution to throw to the wind. I am through with being practical and responsible. I want to be impulsive and irrational. I want to show you the life that is inside you so I can believe that there is still at least one soul left on this planet that is real. I want to give you the last shreds of the strength I have cultivated through all these years, so you can make it before I extinguish.

You told me I am a flame that cannot burn and like that horribly beautiful candle in the velveteen rabbit, burning so brightly, I want to knock myself off the fucking table. I want to whisper to that last spark you are trying to fan to life: "Fuck you, go OUT." Because as much as I need to feel what you put inside me I need to numb it out before it kills me. I need to leave you with beauty, strip you of all the ugliness that surrounds you, and take it back into the shadows, away from the sunlight and the moonlight and the painful radiant stars.

I need to do this because it is the last thing I have left.

And I know as much as I fight to quell the variety of emotions you stir within me, I will succumb to every last one, and like he said, in the end it will be tragic and sublime. Exactly what I shouldn't do and everything I need to at the same time. Because even with the promise of the new life I am so desperately trying to build from the smoking rubble of my own ground zero, I am not capable of believing I can transcend this place. So please, excuse the indifference I treat you with, the harsh words and the truths you have been trying to lock away inside you that I drag out and sift through. I do not mean to be a bastard; it is just what the world has made me.

Give me your wetness so I can feel it on my skin, my lips. Give me your teeth so I can know there is something left to bruise.

Give me your tender fragile soul so that I can place a thorn on each limb to protect each budding rose of talent and faith and optimism you have so that only the right, tender gloved hands can harvest them and arrange them beautifully. Those hands do not belong to another, they belong to you alone. And, those are your petals to trace along the body of another, whoever it is that you choose. And, so help me, I will be curious who it is in the end, and I will be furious it could not be me.

I will be here, where I always am, stalking them just outside the light of your happiness; waiting for them to fuck up just once so I can drag them into the darkness and suffocate them for trying to stop you from ever experiencing anything besides beauty and bliss.

I will be here; a frozen block of glacial ice, floating in your waters, until you melt me down and there is nothing left of me but the swirling whirlwind of an angry defiant current.