Sometimes we hate ourselves. It starts when we're young,

You're a loser, a gawky awkward kid, so the first clear thoughts you get in your head, most of the mornings in your young, insignificant life,  is that you hate yourself.

Wherever you go, there's the same ugly, plain, caveman, simian sorta face.  You stare back at you, from the train windows underground, set against black tunnels.  You're in every shop window you pass, when the sun burns down on your city-sheltered skin.

So you get older, and promise to be better.  You get fitter, buffer, toner.  You get prettied up and shapely if you're a girl.  You mar your body or paint it appropriately.  You don't let a goddamn hand touch your face, not even tender fingers on cheeks, if you were all craters and scars.  You cultivate a style; become an epitome of urban, center-of-the-universe perfection.

You are individual. You possess opinions.  You follow local & global politics.  You have an urge to change the world, but also to find personal happiness.  You make art, or songs, or something that strangers like, get pats on the back and celebratory drinks from your peers.

Without your mother making you, you wash and rinse your hair as frequently as you can without destroying it, and soak it with some sludge, scent evocative of something summer, and pure and clean, or of a sleepy, mildly exotic, distant land.
You kneel in the shower spray until the clock in your head tells you that it's already been five more minutes than the time you've allotted yourself to wallow in your exfoliated, dead skin cells and the draining fluid of the cold womb or grave of the bathtub.

Or maybe you're happy.

Maybe you play love songs, and the way the sun makes everything gleam, and gives a translucent clarity to, makes you secretly want to go weak, fall & lay down, or curl up with loveliness on the warm grass.

Maybe you harbor something that glows, but for now, you're under dark clouds, idling, until that August storm hits. And when it does, the sunset will burn itself into you.

sometimes the sunshine is too much,
the way i need to lock myself in my room, and bring my body low, to the floors,
the way it puts its roaming mouth on my throat, my clavicles, my bared shoulders in the loose, hanging dress, and there is no fight.
they say you can't touch the light, but maybe you can't feel it unless you've got cold fingers, cold skin, or unless you want to be feeling it.

light is apart from all things adjacent.

-

i've taken to arguing with the dream people.

dream-lover in my bed confesses love to me in the dark, and i tell him that i am asleep and he doesn't know he's not real, only another figment of my mind, so i am trying to wake up. and then i wake- know it's another dream,
tell more dream figures that they are things of my mind, and they ask, how does a butterfly know he is not dreaming of reality? and i tell them that as real and convincing it all feels, i know, unless i'm bound in a cell, completely out of my mind.

and then i wake.

sunday, i was murdered, three dreams in a row. they are dream strangers, stabbing me to death. one was a blonde beauty. another, a madman. another, i can't remember. i argue with them all, tell them nonplussed, that it is a dream, and that they are figments, as scary as they might be if they were real. they don't believe me, and separately kill me. i wake up unphased- i've been killed before.
i suppose i just didn't like the dreams, otherwise, perhaps i'd humor them, and play along. there is a reality.

what does it mean when you fight the strangers in your dreams, tell them the truth about their reality, and they don't believe you? does it mean they want to be real, or is it because they don't believe me, or is it because i want them to not believe me? i suppose it's good that my dreams never stare back at me, and look at me, deep into who i am. they are never sentient of me, like strangers.

-

sometimes in writing too long, i feel like i'm losing myself.
is that why you shouldn't steal characters from your dreams?
what if you fall in love with them?

how beautiful you are when you're all sorts of fucked up inside,
like the way that damned croissant won't sit right,
but it looked so damn good, all soft and buttery
until it went down, greasy, like a dirty marble stuck in your windpipe,
or
a chunk of old garbaged stormdrain ice, rammed in just right of the heart,
and i go god, it's like a storm, a filthy ocean on my tits and in my lungs
and i never learned how to swim, so i'm puking the bittersweet sea and sol
and sand and i'm going oh

-

but i was a good girl, and god, i tried so hard, i'm always trying so hard,
so damn willful, maybe that's why you slap us, because what
is a woman but a girl with another wet face, and what are tears but salt
when you are only dirt and when men cry all the time when some boot
trods over their dust bodies or when even on days i don't believe in you,
you're still leaving me to die
same girl, face in the splintering floor with the elbows dug into my back
that you forged steel so i could crawl,
and carry my cuts and skin scrapes like a cabochon of your crafting

-

and god, i am lonely, so you made a boy with as many ribs as mine,
and gave him frost's apple trees and a tongue for pears,
and gave me a song of frost & hollow wind in the nights,
and change for a few cups of dark, milkless coffee,
and i threw up