dexwritesthings

There's something wrong with the minutes in my head - I pack too many words in them. It's just a syllable, not a competition - but it's the only time I'm allowed to decide when this ends. You were the second thing I ever felt. I called you for security and not much else. And this won't leave me playing sadder songs for months; I always say too much. So there's a stack of letters on the dresser; please send them out if I didn't get to it in time. You can have all of my books if you burn the journals in the drawer. I know I'm leaving too much undone in both our lives. And yeah, they took the guns; one in January, one last week. But the most important thing I learned from you is what my epitaph should read: You know, the impossible - it never stopped me.

I wanted to draw you a picture but how the fuck do you make the rain look real? I'm being honest but it's the same as words: Stuttered. Incoherent. Slurred. It's not the only place to feel vulnerable. It's in a camera lens; an unopened message. You have a lot to say. You have a lot of nerve in black and white. In twelve-point type. All those long words giving me the ink to hide behind and read between, more white space than I'll ever need. Every motion-sick word you speak is another unstable line to complicate and we're dogwhistling these droning needs, hoping someone notices. Hoping that you're noticing. But aren't you so goddamn tired of me this week? Because I am, I am, I am.

I want to ask how you've been doing at three a.m. and what does it mean that I'm always dreaming of sharks and off-white pirate ships painted red with old blood? There's always some malfunction and I can't tell if it's me or I just keep forgetting to load the gun.

Days feel like hours and hours feel like years and all these terse phrases in the present tense are a lifelong prayer to superiority in indifference, an off-key hymn of acquiescence to the apathy. We could be godlike, the arrogance of faith pacing us through the stillness of our terrible compassion. They could worship our wreckage like bystanders in the aftermath; the complete history of nothing in one hopeless gaze. If there is a path it's there in all the countless ways I can't believe in anything anymore except this collection of righteous injustice that will never manage to carry its own weight. But where do you go when the beast off the path finally catches your scent; when you can feel it carving the whispered syllables of your name into its unknowable mind?

A car, the ocean, a coal-black sky patched with clouds and a full moon silvering the edges; the green signs with white letters gone dull in the dark and us still somehow knowing all the words. All the warnings, disregarded. Apathy as an art form, as a path to becoming invincibile. We walked down the pier, on old wood wet with salt and decay and only just enough strength as imperfect parts of a whole. We sat at the end with our feet in the water. I was thinking about murder, about duct tape and zip ties, about throwing dead weight over the side. Then you lit a cigarette and the moment passed. You looked in my eyes like you knew me but when I stared back I just felt empty again. It wasn't a revelation, just awareness like a deafening silence where something substantial used to be. Something leaving too much space too quickly. I couldn't remember who I was supposed to be. I just wanted you to hear me without having to say it, without having to struggle t

I keep coming back to that one line: Did you hear your favorite song one last time? So that's a new specific fear to carry in the back of my throat and keep me from trying new things. Sigh and give me one more look from the corner of your eye. You want to be unpredictable. You say: Nobody queues up a song about divorce to watch explosions in the sky. You say: No one plays Rise Against at an overdose but maybe that's just what they need. Set the outside world just one notch above the impotent screaming rage of all those louder thoughts; make sure it doesn't end in three or seven. I've never had the decency to disavow what's living in the space my conscience left. So stop trying to explain how you didn't see it coming. I'm not convinced. Stop trying to explain why you're always wearing the wrong clothes for this. It's always that selective empathy with you and I'm just never convinced. You loved it when we sang it. You love

Put a man in a courtroom or a church; scrub him of his sins and what's left? Nothing interesting. It's not compelling anymore. It doesn't even have to be the defendant or the penitent; in fact, it's probably best that he's not. Sympathy is the difference between antihero and antagonist. Complicity and disgust. I made a thing but I didn't make you feel. Is that my failure or yours? I made a thing and left all the feeling in the white space. It's the only way to say the unspeakable. Take away the lines between the lines and what's left? Nothing interesting. A pen is just a pen until you use it. Until you turn it into a weapon. Vivisection or blunt force trauma? I want to be something useful, a gun or a paintbrush, to leave you something in an empty room in the place that you might someday go. To say: I know this place. I was here, but I just couldn't wait anymore. It's the difference between context and conviction.

I wish I could juxtapose it in a way that makes sense, like   the words aren't stuck, backed up, pressing their urgency against the gap at the bottom of my ribcage, behind my eyes, in the heartbeat pulse of my fingertips or the static of sleeping feet. You wanted a fence and you got a fortress. You wanted a chance but you got me. How do you navigate a shadow without existing in direct light? Don't be subtle. That boy in the reflection is the only thing real about me. Those words are right where they belong and it's not your fault that your voice is rejection. You didn't mean it. This isn't the car crash; just the aftermath. There. Just like that. Bandaged up but only thinking of the seconds ticking back to neutral. I wish I had hands that could translate the smell of blood on the driveway but all I can give you is the sound of giving up. It sounds like doors slamming and the screaming quiet ticking of a cooling-down car. It sounds like questi

Don't lecture  a nihilist  on the end of the world or compassion. What's the point? That's what got us here. Staring into an abyss we thought would look like nothing but looks just like the past instead. It's nice to think you're exempt from regression except reality doesn't mean much anymore. And here I am reorganizing my heroes by where they fall on a list of enemies of the state.

I wanted to explain to you how darkness loves me but I knew you'd tell me that doesn't mean I have to love it back.  I wanted to ask: Is there a logic to these infinite moments, lined up and waiting; t o all this dislocation and how the little noises of a life being lived keep getting written in the past tense? you were supposed to say: If you could change the worst of yourself, which part would you choose to fix? You were supposed to say it just like that, so I could tell you: Everything. I wanted you to ask me why I've been talking in my sleep, to see if you cared enough to take my nightmares and make them yours. I wanted you to know: I had another dream of killing. Of being killed. Of an ominous quiet in that inhuman place where human monsters are made. Just next door, where all your shadows have teeth. I was wishing I could take it back, thinking: If I keep looking down, if I keep holding this breath, if I keep entirely still - he'll never notice I exist

This is just the end of everything I thought I knew: Headlights in thunderstorms and War All the Time in the back of the car; all those times I couldn't think of what I should do with my hands. So by all means,  make this more uncomfortable for us both. I spent that whole year bleeding out in your bed so I wouldn't have to go back home. That was the turning point. That was when everything started slipping out of control. We wanted to set fires. We wanted to be set free. We wanted self-destruction, suicide, without ever having to die. Well. You know. There's so much I can't remember. Like:  When was it that I walked away  from one or another childhood game, not knowing it was the last time I'd play? There are a lot of ways, infinite ways, to fail to describe a feeling. So I gave you The Weakerthans and you gave me Dashboard Confessional. It seemed like a fair trade at the time but lately I'd j

I had a dream that you found out I wasn't dead and you weren't angry anymore. I did it for you, anyway -  like that time we got high in your backyard while your mother went shopping and your brother played on the swings. You told me once that the truth isn't always factual and I think I understand it now; it has something to do with how you can never define what you're feeling but those nights you could see your breath, a car crash in red and black and chrome, the edge at your fingers until you're coloring red on your skin, makes you feel it all again anyway. The song that played Russian roulette with my confidence every time you called; I lost, but -  were we supposed to be keeping score? The truth is we were haunted already, falling asleep drunk at sunrise in the house with the dead girl's room upstairs -  but that comes later. For now I'm just sorry about the blood on my clothes, about the fingerprints bruised on the side of your n

I contrive words to describe an illiterate arc of thought, confined to arbitrary meanings till the illustration's lost. Exercise expression through abandoned buildings, vacant lots; I'd revise my own admissions but this apathy has costs. Every empty instinct waits for civil sanity to rot and these distinctive traits are drivel vanity concocts. Written keys unlock the fugue, compulsion's sleeper cell, and terrorize this mind set right, made impulsively unwell. Set alight, or set to die, in a mental basement room; I'd prefer the lies before i'm dealt disjointed hints of truth handed out by self-appointed arbiters who muse on passing time and bleak insight, superiority assumed. when I've discarded viral drives felt vital to my self and mind; rewarded liars left entitled, kept what destiny assigns; I'll edge and struggle forward toward decay that feels like home, and slowly disassemble, disarray discarded blood and bone. In time divided infinite

I've seen a million sketching time in empty rooms that stretch the night to abscessed wounds and textured lines and cracks in walls that search and climb a structured track. Synaptic sparks strut and tour a path that starts with lust for more than lasts or parts and ends with words that fast depart. Confined obsessions stir to rise and leave coherent thoughts consigned to languish in subconscious minds with perfect murders: Yours or mine?

It's morning and cold. It's raining beyond the awning but I'm sweating and the sweat just makes it colder. I'm waiting on the car and I'm not thinking ahead, or if I am, I'm  convincing myself it'll all work out. There are enough times it doesn't, but there are always new solutions, old recycled solutions, solutions cobbled from half-thoughts and fever dreams, different perspectives on solutions that have failed. As if you can shape the future through sheer force of will. Turns out you can; I've been doing it for years. The trick is  not to leave yourself any other option. So it gets stifling. You  feel boxed in. You'd like to harness all that energy, let it command you to other things, but that's a decision for tomorrow. That's effort for another day, and you're always pretty sure you'll have another day. You aren't them. Four times in one year, but you don't feel like o

Slate sky cracks fire, nightfall always kidnaps dusk. The faithful lack their liars but we're all just blood and dust. Wait awhile, find time conspires with us to constrain us. Rank and file mind the wire with a minimum of fuss. Rank and vile, uninspired, slaves to love and lust. Walk the miles, overtired, to make the insane cut. Talking smiles in empty faces, sounds that crowd my ears. Rising bile, senses fading; I'd learn to drown my fears. A padlocked gate, a dark mindscape; words just interfere. A sandbox fate, a spark of hate, and a conscience, clear. These last few days begin to stray to what the future has in store. Iconoclast of moments past and a cynicism ill-informed. I can't relate, associate; this prism glass reflects, distorts. Imprisoned concepts congregate in a memory of sorts. A way to fall and how to find the wrong in evened scores, and how long it's been since I've belonged or fast tried to conform. A life so small in time so long

You live like you think someone's always watching, and who knows - maybe they are. Or, maybe, you're just a little bit paranoid, maybe you've got a guilty conscience. Well. Definitely that. Midnight, mid-June, and I was driving with the windows down. I couldn't hear you with the music up loud when I pulled into the drive. We were kids then, Converse and bare feet and you choking out words like the noise of all our thoughts made it hard to breathe, and you, listening to that same sad song over and over again. I'll remember it that way; I choose to. But now it's tomorrow again and we can't take back all the things we'll do today. So make it last or  at least make it count -  every second,  everything you do has to mean more  than the knowledge that it ends and all the ways it can. So we stay desperate, the time slipping away with every song on the

It's just another place to live where the sound of the rain outside makes you feel hopeless and you have to tell yourself that waking up isn't the worst thing that could happen. Every second strains under the weight of not remembering -  the smell of Newports and exhaust in a car on a summer day, how you love and hate the sunrise at exactly the same time, all those empty intersections whispering like ghosts, and the dead who haunt your lists of calls you didn't take. Everything inside you feels misplaced. Someone's always rearranging the layout of your heart until you can't remember how you got those scars. So you're spending your nights digging through those boxes labeled Misery and hoping you'll find something else inside, because the only thing you want is to sell or trade your past mistakes, and for something to be different i n you this time.