Shot through with a hole
Shot up with hot oatmeal
Paste over gaps in me
Unseen injuries
Echoing cavities
I’ve loved each nameless stranger
In some missing life
In some foreign time
And goddamn I miss them
Acutely re-align
In their wake
As if we shared the same path
And as theirs branches make goodbyes
Through followed eyes like dripping glass
Enamoured with a sketch
Enamoured with a void
A negative space portrait
Of this imploded and destroyed
In love with a shadow
In love with a picture made of the absence
The unrequited ache of the devoid
Let Go Of Me
Who is me in a different twist of time? When the time ran out. Someone smaller as a wilting half, or stronger as a complete solid whole? This life is all I know, and I sometimes like to pretend I have seen more edges than this plane has. Who is the person that continued through the winds of the track that never merged? I made a decision when I was young. I made a deal I didn’t understand the magnitude of. The lock turned silent without me noticing and I couldn’t tell what I was really doing. I had not lived through it yet. Would I have made the same choice if I had seen visions of where it led?
I cannot know. All I can do is wrestle, now as I sit here in the future wondering which directions were right, and which were right in the wrong light. I am baked into the last decade, a person at the end of a path with a specialist’s experience in a subject I can’t bear to examine anymore. Is this misfortune? Has the richness rotted me? Am I being pulled through this pale existence by fear, or by a regret so stubborn it only pushes deeper into itself, until I am forever lost? How can I miss myself so much? Where did I go and why did I leave? What words could I untangle in a letter that might reach myself and convince them to come home?
The more life becomes motions, the more meaningless it shows itself to be. The more I am disappointed in myself, the more I despise this cubicle I have painted myself into. And worse is the dread at the sheer swallowing upkeep hours it takes to keep the paint looking fresh, as if it was what I wanted. And truly the worst is that I sweat hard for a finish I can only ever get to look half-hearted, because really it was more one-tenth hearted and four-tenths faked at my own strain for someone else who will never be happy with what I gave them, even if it is five times more than I really have. But they will still never let me go, even if they don’t like it. Not everyone is as disappointing as me. Not everyone would ask so much more of me than I have. Let me go. Let go of me.
Quit Vision 