the field, the signal

The artillery of thunder on top of us. Petrichor bursting in the window. You tilting your head, and my mouth exploding a shiver in you, as lips, teeth, tongue land on your neck. Your salt is the lightning that zaps me, jaw to spine.

My power is staying the fuck awake. I did it through decades of poison: people, culture, my own fucking self. I never tapped out. I never actually rested. I held the breath of real truth even as I drowned in sludge.

I kicked out the fucking poison, but I still don’t sleep. I train. I fuck. I write. And I get myself awake to more honesty every fucking day.

I always wanted to be purified. Dragged through the dirt then made clean. Wanted to gulp my fill of oxygen, for once. Now when the water’s ice grips my tipped-back head, my jaw slips open, my eyes shiver shut, and I exhale like I’m making room to gulp. Dirtier than ever, still not clean, but finally free.

In another life, my mind wasn't turned into my personal torture chamber where my self-worth got buried every day. Who knows what the fuck I did with the two-and-a-half decades of my adult life in that alternate timeline? But I know what I didn't have to do—spend 27 fucking years trying to fix myself enough to keep surviving.

April 29, 2014

I keep getting seduced by creativity, by making things with mybrainmyhandsmymouthmytongue. I can't stop. making. shit that serves no real purpose other than to make me joyful, to please me, to make me feel love, to make love.

All I want to do is fuck around.

Not even dawn yet. A kiss, a hop, then I slam the pickup door. I wave and step back. Then bang—flames from the tailpipe. All gasoline and burnt dirt as I linger to watch him drive away.

I was not made to pump my blood into work that has no meaning in the world, that commits the sin of never learning from mistakes, that crushes those who do it.

I was not made to take care of everyone else.

I was not made to be domesticated.

I was not made to politely avoid speaking the unspeakable.

I was not made to live half-dead.

after making and eating chicken liver pâté

We worship hollow clean ease the way we worship bleached white smiles. So we shield our eyes, our mouths, our stomachs from dirt and ugly truth. Fuck ease. Let me have the dirt and ugly truth. Let me have the liver. It's solid, and solid is real and nourishing. Hollow ain't.

I am ruined for the world. And I don’t want to be fixed.

I played competent, functional, and proper for decades. Then I lost my mind. Maybe I’m still losing it.

Because now I don’t believe in their clean hands. I don’t believe in their clocked-in lives. I don’t believe in their performance of “okay.” I don’t believe in anything they told me I had to be to be loved.

I believe in me. I didn’t always, and it didn’t come easy. But I do now, and I will forever. Because the only alternative was going under. And I refused to die.

So fuck their virtues. Fuck their systems. Fuck their scaffolds built from obedience and shame. Fuck their fetishes for voyeuristic punishment and pleasure denial.

I burned down the whole thing. And what’s left is me.

Not some pristine healed version. Not a return._ Just me._

Alive. On fire. And never going back.