This Side of Mourning

I live inside different shades. 
There is never a single solace.

What I’m trying to explain are these
waves of mania and weeks of drowning
that I constantly find myself 
treading, practicing this

dead man’s float centuries.

You couldn't understand how many honest letters
I have sewn onto my rib cage; I suppose my heart
is a wild animal that can’t be tamed for that
is why it is placed inside a cage. Or maybe
I’m just f*****g crazy for always wanting
to name my children after the sounds
these bones hitting against each other every time
I’ve had to watch them break over and over and over. 

These shades of blue red, white
consume me; and my lungs
cannot withstand technicolor pallets 
of false acoustic rifts plagiarized 
from your previous love melodies.
You look at me with distant eyes 
that refused to meet my drenched eyelashes. 
There is nothing beautiful about 
the sanctuary of a lost love.
You have forced me to romanticize starvation.
And to be really honest, these poems
are nothing more than things
I wish I could say to you. Or you. 
Or you. But I am only left with myself.
Instead I am left to suffocate 
while everybody else notices
merely this silent sleep.

There is nothing worse than ignorance.
There is nothing worse than family ignorance.
There is nothing worse than dead family. 
There is nothing worse than not talking about it.
But even if you held a gun to my temple;
I still wouldn’t speak. I still wouldn’t speak.

 

I guess I have been raised with wired lips.
I would rather have to taste my own blood
than ever share this crimson with anyone.
A bitterness so thick is not worth sharing
when an impressionist is unimpressed. 
I need to impress you. I need to hear you say, “wow”. 
I need you to tell me you love me. I need you 
to not have to apologize over mourning starlight.

I think people only know how to own me.
I wish people didn’t wish to own me.
Everybody will buy stars, thinking they
are creating man-made light, but what you
all need to understand is that sometimes
they just belong inside the sky.
Even stealing all the stars wouldn’t change 
that you’re still a thief. 
Manufactured light is still living inside the dark.

So leave me to weather my storms alone.
If you understand any of this, I’m so sorry.
I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy. 
How do you find peace when
you cannot help but wake up
so f*****g pissed off because
the fan got unplugged, and the silence
just makes you want to smash all the 
porcelain China just to feel calm?

But the numerous shades of blue:
a blue jay, the sky,
the outline on your cotton table-cloth;
the rim of your coffee mug. 

A quilt work  of goodbyes are stitched 
to this heartbeat; leaving me breathless. 
My soul is only used to this constant
battle of believing in this world
when we can’t even believe in our bodies. 

The days of burning has left long since, 
but I can still smell the smoke roiling inside this air. 

So don’t tell me I’m a bad guy
for not talking about it,
because sometimes people
need to feel the blue to find
the red, but stumbling
into purple because a mess
always leads to something new. 

These shades never come from
multiple facets of grey; I always feel in black or white.

Manic nights and miserable mornings.
Sleepless nights, or restless mornings.
From a petal’s ripple into a drowning tsunami. 
I could never merely hide how I felt,
and I don’t know if that is a blessing, or curse