It's All So Simple

Drafts from Death of the Abstract Artist

"Life is bad and good; but much worse and

better than ever before.

I want to learn many things but they never come.

I want to pick myself apart but I don't know how to put it back together again.

I want to see which pieces stick.

I want to see what I can live without.

I have run without heart before, without brain;

and mind peddles on regardless of body's presence.

each little complicated strand that makes them up;

Well, I can't be sure they all have a purpose.

When a puzzle is dumped onto the table,

you can't tell what is missing

until you put it together, just as instructed.

There, in the jumble, it is safe from scrutiny.

We know it is incomplete; it is still moving.

It cannot yet be defined.

I never want to finish the puzzle.

I never want to finish anything.

Imagine all that pressure; to be complete,

to have everything neatly in place forever.

I can't take the pressure

I can't stand the way it fizzes up in my brain.

I'd rather explode, jesus.

I'd rather they scrape me from the sidewalk.

I don't want an open casket.

I don't want a eulogy or a six-foot-hole,

I just want the flowers.

I want someone to dry them for me.

I sit and write some nights.

None of my poems are good lately,

and I'm listening to way more

Penelope Scott than usual.

My chest is a cavity of living things

or maybe a good old-fashioned funeral

parlor.

My ribs may be the tree canopy, scratching at my skin from the wrong side,

or the tall, arching ceilings; which would explain why this godforsaken body of mine

never breaks in the way I want. Nothing ever cracks cleanly

and each time I pull off skin; new layers appear beneath it.

Healthy, warm, beating skin. Unsullied and unspoiled,

even the ways I twisted it never left a mark.

I want nothing and something;

I want to see a supernova.

I want to see the stellar nursery.

I want to follow a star from birth to death.

Does it hurt?

Does it hurt to be so very big and so very small? Does it hurt to be someone's everything and everyone's nothing?

Can contradiction kill you?

I think it will kill me.

I am sure it will be the death of me.

I have already planned out my gravestone. It will be blank;

it will have paragraphs and paragraphs

of wayward ramblings;

of paranoid passages

in a language only I can read.

One I will someday forget.

And have already forgotten.

Please god, don't let it come back.

Please. Please.

Save me.

I will not survive this time."

P.S. Nothing I've written lately sounds right. DOTAA may take longer than anticipated. I want this one to be good. I do not know if I capable of that.