dexwritesthings

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