Long Climb

You’ve seen the view from the peak
But never felt the ache deep in your bones until you reached
The final steps back down
Jolts like a machine gun
Poles magnetising to old feelings

Reintroduced to strides from the way up
Feel their fresh pain again as you can’t forget what you’ve seen
Got used to altitude at the top
Of battered decisions you’re back wading through the details of

To the exit

It’s a long climb
Towards a final night
Towards a final slice of your old life
And though you know it’s right
It could never be

Fit in it one last time
And then leave

There’ll be a final night
There’ll be a drawn out tearing goodbye
There’ll be an edge defined
As you fall from it
As you exit the eyes
You inhabited

Fit in one last time
And then that’s it

Singularity

I didn’t dream of anyone who liked me
Strain not to completely forget how to like anyone else
I suppose I’m paying the proverbial heavy price
It’s a shifting comfort to mean I’m on a line
I can only just afford the weekly installments
That drag in a tight queue behind me
Accumulating interest in this slowly spitting friction
Sometimes I curse the blunt knife that I chose carefully

We crawl so loosely
Easy to forget that we’re even moving
Towards a smashed horizon I can’t see
Past it’s void singularity

You’re Dead, Says the Wall

First of all, anxieties that burn until they suddenly disappear unresolved, why do they do that? Only to return home like a swarming cloud, awoken from their sleep to sting and swell on you like mouth ulcers, painfully brushed with every internal movement of logic. If they’re helpful let them stay so I can shoot their source dead, and if they’re not let them loose to fuck off and dissipate from neural pulses into static electricity. But like every wall I’ve ever sat across from face-to-face, it’s not that simple. The only truly simple truth I’ve ever learnt first-hand is that complication is sewn in the fabric of anything that has ever moved, and that’s everything, ever. It’s death, I think. You have to think about your own consistently delayed death to survive for any amount of time, but you have to forget about it too, as an aching, unresolvable worry, to ever really live. And so that’s why I have the psychological apparatus to feel utterly and existentially spooked by the record of my accumulated decision making until the horror loses its voice and hushes and I just forget to keep up the worry and I go off to make a few more decisions.

Secondly, I want to be on my own. I want to be alone but my brain is playing cards, in a secret back room it thinks I don’t know about, but of course I do, but if this game has to happen then honestly it needs to remain out of sight. This is a controversial exploration, and I can’t stop this personification of my brain (as if it’s separate from me, which it’s not) from travelling into this dangerous territory. It is a delicate system and a delicate game and I want to be alone, but the stakes let no question rest and I don’t know all the rules and I never could and the players could be bluffing, but I’d tell because I can see into their heads because they are me, but I’ve looked and I still can’t tell because they don’t even know themselves. I have done the equations and refined the calculations until the emotional science remains stable enough for a verdict, and I know what the answer is in as much as anyone can know anything is true in any science; That is that you can never know anything, you can only give your best estimate based on repeatable evidence. And that’s all I hang onto in this chemical storm. 

I want to be alone, I have weighed it up. But there’s still weight on the other side too, and because of that the decision was awful to balance. The other side is not empty, a part of me lives there, still in this relationship, unready to leave with the rest of me. And so I have these visions of a thing I don’t want at all. A thing it is dangerous to even speak of, painful to hear the pronunciation. Categorically the wrong thing, the thing none of me wants. And yet the visions appear. The auroras of meshing physical forms of two conflicting sides of me. My internal atmosphere screaming for harmony, mixing dissonant ideologies to find the few straggling, disjointed parts that will emulsify with each other, creating an ideal drastically unrepresentative of either side it is made of parts from. I don’t want to be with another, in fact, a desire like that is the one thing that could most devastatingly blast this all to hell. Both sides in conflict agree on this. And yet, in trying to break up the fight happening deep inside me, some busy-bodied solutionizer element of my subconscious is combining the want to be out of this relationship (from my winning ‘leave’ side) with the want to be with someone (from my losing ‘stay’ side), rendering both angles meaningless by stripping them of their context and jamming them together crudely like action-figures to kiss and make-up into something condemnable. It’s all wrong and I want it out of my head. Its comfort isn’t real and it’s so volatile a thought that it’s a serious liability to mention even here, just to get it out of me. It’s deadly and futile and I want the nonsensical path to it eased from my brain. I want to be alone.

I’m… Sorry

Today is one of the hard days. They come and they go. 
We have fun and we don’t. 
Things are fixed then they’re broke. 

I try to be a sponge for the pain, but I caused it too. 
And you caused it for me before I turned back at you. 
The balance is lost now, but it was my numb hurt that kept it in check. 
So yes, I brought this hurt, but I didn’t invent it. 
It wasn’t born in me and to have me is not your default, no matter how it feels it might be. 

Today sucks because it rains
And we lay writhing in pain at each other’s opposite visions.
 
You cry and I am blank. 
For once in my life I am prepared and preplanned. 
I did my crying in instalments and now my debt is almost paid. 
Unlike everything else, this time it isn’t you who has saved. 
And you can blame me, and I’ll take it from you, 
Because despite what you say, I cared and still do. 
I’m sorry that it’s only hitting you now,
And it feels like I’m stealing from you somehow. 
I’m sorry it’s hard and I’m sorry it hurts,
And I’m sorry that you can’t believe all my words. 
The person you need no longer exists,
Because he is me, the one rupturing this. 
It’s been the hardest design that I’ve ever made, 
And I’m sorry we never could feel quite the same.