dexwritesthings

i've never been more of a goddamn liar than when i'm begging you: be honest. i can take it. i won't be resentful. i won't hold it against you, i promise. so the only thing i hear these days is: get off your fucking knees; but i don't know how, and you won't say, and the next step forward is so damn far away.

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...