i.
sometimes all it takes
to feel powerful again
(read: normal)
is boots and a denim jacket
a short puff on a small blunt
and walking in to a dimly-lit, music-less bedroom --
alone --
while the rain hits the veranda

and I wonder how I could
ever
not be
good


ii.
when I was getting high
and writing foreign poems
late at night
every night
about the night
and didn't have steel pins in me
and didn't mind getting caffeine\drunk

then I felt like an artist
then I felt like I's creating things

then I felt
like a
human being


iii.
I feel like i'm on the precipice
of being 18 again
thick in the hea(r)t of it
melting into regular epiphany
bordering on genius,
all the while complaining
about being 18 again --

but here's the trick:
I knew more then than I know now,
but I didn't know it

san/

you keep talking about that trip
like you didn't experience the paranoia
I did
like you
weren't afraid of burning the house down
a second time -
I was

you keep talking about it being earth-provided
but there's nothing natural
about my head

dancing out and away from my body
a tiny me-ghoul reminding me
of my own
creeping mortality

every time I am high now
I remember I will die
and I imagine all the ways
it might happen

including you turning a knife on me

there's nothing natural about that

and when I am awake,
alive and
not in other states
I'm caught up in the most
unholy, unworldly of heads -
I'm not even here
I'm culling myself thin

thinner than when I vomited for two days straight
thinner than my bones feel on acid
thinner than the line that's driven itself
between I
and
you

thinner than my bank account
thinner than my ability to talk sense
thinner than my ferritin levels
after rice-bread-potatoes
for three months straight

thinner than the space between my eyebrows
as it slowly collapses in on itself