hello and welcome to the talent show guess what my talent is my talent is being sad im better at being sad

than almost anyone how to be sad the right way is you stare off into space for a really long time until you cant feel anything and then you wait 10-12 years for it to explode out of you and ruin your life i am the champion of ruining my life i am the best at feeling all of my feelings now most of my feelings are sad thank you for listening

i had another panic attack on the freeway it wasnt interesting and i didnt have anything to say about it really except that it felt as though god was swinging his fists at the air directly above me ive noticed when i write about god with an antagonistic slant i tend to use male pronouns and when i write about god as something more subtle or even benevolent i always use female pronouns on a daily basis i find myself becoming less and less concerned with other peoples idea of what poetry is and also with my own idea of what poetry is i am like mark wahlberg in boogie nights but instead of having a giant penis i have a giant heart and when it metaphorically unfurls out in front of me i am sitting cross-legged on my bed crying my eyes out and whispering into my front-facing camera phone i am a star, i am a star, i am a big bright shining star and if you dont think that is poetry you can go fuck yourself

crying is nice like through sand fingers pushing apart what they guessed to be solid. i get to do whatever i want whenever i want to do it most of the time, apart from feeling safe. give me night sky, extra clouds, feeling in my hands. give me mania that isnt only another poem about itself. i never want to go to sleep sleeping anything off after today. the way gloves live is how i feel about this.

listening to screamo and binge eating barbecue chips, i want to die i want to be dead. i can feel the couch underneath me, but dont care that it is there. fuck me, i say aloud, to nothing and everything in particular. i have skin like a screen door. its high tide in my sad fucker zone. i feel so alive in the worst way possible. alive 2.0. alive 2000. mega alive. alive in a way that has passed. im coming back. im always coming back. cadence of a fish and all that. yum. life is so delicious. i shovel bits of it into my mouth without thinking about it until i look down and see that it is all gone. i dont know how i got here. there are spider webs growing from the underside of my car to the street. i dont see any spiders. i drive away wondering if ive killed anything.

you leave your house because you heard sitting indoors all day was bad for you you drive to the grocery store and you dont have a panic attack or anything but while looking at the frozen food you feel a sense of absence from the world and you wonder what the point of all existence is, and you settle on nothing but youre not having a panic attack by no means are you having a panic attack this is definitely not a panic attack this is the result of trying to be your own life coach and your own flotation device in a sea of people who seem to know what they are doing, or are at least able to stop themselves from thinking about the face that they dont know what they are doing so you say fuck it and drive home you stand outside in the sun for two and a half minutes and call today a success

last night i slept for 2.5 hours before something in my blood woke me up. lets call it high levels of cortisol or fear of failure or even maybe father (i know i know i know i know). the lights went on in my head before id had the chance to learn with my hands, and now im tugging on myself, yelling where is the woman in me? i think im going to die. i think this is it. i found a growth on my arm the other day. i keep coughing. i cant think straight. i looked up my symptoms and the website says im definitely dying, so. this bed is less like a coffin and more like the thing that will put me there. i need to get out. paint my nails. put on some lipstick. say fuck you with my eyes to passersby. ive got power but the sun just keeps laughing at the way i try to shield myself from it. maybe if i let it drain me long enough i can get my full 8 hours of sleep.

things you wont believe we survived i want to walk the streets of your voice and sleep against the hot air vents of your sidewalks. i want to dream about another city inside of you filled with powdery bone dust and gold-plated ceilings. there is a person blowing between buildings like a scrap of yesterdays paper, a reminder of the end of the world falling on deaf ears. they taste like fresh ground peppers and failure. they sweat out rivers that fill reservoirs that we drink from when we are sad. it tastes like relief. you are stunning in the sun. you are living proof that all confidence is, by definition, false confidence. you are the endlessness of two mirrors facing one another. one day i forgot how to drive. the freeway cracked beneath my wheels, opened up and swallowed me whole. i found a world where gravel felt like blankets, where my blood comforted me with its warmness. i was a piece of glass among several pieces of glass. you picked me up and sliced your finger open. you found comfort in your blood too.

i want to hold your hand in a field of people holding hands i dont want to dream about anything ever again i just want to close my eyes at night and open them in the morning i want my right arm spanning my body and yours so that ill be everywhere at once when i am waking up i dont want the feeling of the world coming back to me i want it to never have left i want to be in it so hard that the ground moves in time with my feet and the air lets me breathe it without recourse i want to find a field of people holdings hands and i want to hold your hand in it i want us to be gently aware of everything

this is a super mega love poem and it ends with us dead i dream of winning the lottery and taking you by the hand to fade with me into capitalist bliss id buy myself an endless supply of toothbrushes and clean my teeth with something new every day until i die i could buy you things that youve only heard of in bad metaphors id keep a vase by your side of the bed and put new flowers in it while you are sleeping so you wont ever have to watch anything die and id never write another awful fuckin love poem again in my life id commission someone to paint a portrait of every selfie we ever take and i would build a new house just to hold our selfies when we die id have our bodies shot up into space and then sent back to burn up in the atmosphere and people will wish on us and we will be pure light and we will be scattered everywhere

i am tall and made of dead flowers you thought you saw me january 1st setting fire to pasadena, but i was in san bernardino licking gunpowder off an old friends fence, and i said your name at the top of the staircase in front of the old school we used to call hell or whatever it was when id climb out of the water, dripping wet in front of you and the mountains and now i feel like the smog that settles in the lowest parts of you when you think of me.

things i did during the infinite dream that occurs at the moment of death i cut off my hair and bleached the cut off strands of hair i kissed a one-way mirror with the lights turned off on both sides i made a fist at the edge of a melting glacier i built a radio out of old cameras and broken airplane parts i stopped talking for five hundred years i licked everything and it stayed wet and glistening i married a flower i cried while watching clouds become rain i woke up every morning to stifled laughter

i am glistening perpetually on the edge of a leaf the sky is sober the light is too consistent ive parked my car under a tree that is begging for live everything in my field of vision has smeared across itself when i scream into the pillow i am thinking this is the portal to heaven i cant wait to meet whatever god is and shake her hand

ive written maybe five good poems about the feeling you get when you cry for the first time after not having cried for a long time and this is not one of them i said something about mountains i said i came from mountains i said i stare a lot at mountains i think mountains might be some of the shittiest things in existence i pressed my fingers against a car window while the sun flooded in like it owned the place and i stared at the mountains i cried for the first time after not having cried for a long time

i am sad but i dont want to write about being sad im going to write about being happy oh boy, i am eating a bowl of vanilla yogurt and my toes are so far away and life is fuckin beautiful!

this is personal i say goodnight to myself every night and the way i do this is i relax my muscles and i cry sometimes i dont listen to good music or touch myself for a week because i dont feel like i deserve pleasure my sheets are blue and twisted, like the ocean after a storm i do lots of things right sometimes i unimpaled myself from a steel gate when i said she, not he everything in my city is closed right now the guy on the radio is screaming about immigrants i want him to suffer i want to stop myself from suffering my heart is microwaved styrofoam stuck between my own teeth

i think about not thinking about death more than anything else i have another panic attack on the freeway and the best thing i can say about this is that it never gets boring. some religious people make me wanna be an atheist and most atheists make me wish i was religious but for now i am neither i guess and that is cool and it sucks. i feel bad that seeing a congested group of white lights on the road is so much more satisfying than seeing just more than a few red ones in front of me, because i am condemning with my heart a large group of strangers to a shitty night. there is weird smell coming from my laptop fan. i think its time is almost up. i think its time i coming. weird how those two phrases can mean pretty much the same thing.

i sat on the hard steps in january, looking up your nose while you shouted nothing matters, nothing matters, cant you see that its all smog? and thats great, thats really great i ate plain cornflakes for breakfast every day like a goddamn dork and youre fucking off every moment like sugar was never invented i guess these mountains must feel nice inside all of this fog but i just want to be dead in my backyard with you standing over my body and will be in two months, itll be snowing and ill be staring up at the stars screaming from behind my eyelids about how everything is too much this or too much that and maybe when youre gone ill queer myself back up and throw out all those ugly flannel shirts you liked to wrap around my little arms i dont care, i dont care, cant you see that we were all just clouds the sun forgot to ruin?

dysphoria if skin were clothes and i could grow in a field my bones would taste sunlight i stand in my backyard, watch airplanes fly over it, feel a sense of longing i sit in bed, wonder about blood clots, dont care i dream about clotheslines dotting my immediate space everything i am drying in the june

sometimes in a moment of dj vu i forget where i am and my hands bleed into the bed and the bed bleeds into the wall. there are colors becoming other colors and it doesnt mean anything. this is always happening and we never notice. one layer. whats a layer? were touching through layers. two tin cans and infinite string, all directions. talk to me, say something, use words that i dont have to go back to college to understand. do you care that the world is trash? i do. im trash. im in love with the feeling of it.

i love the internet and i love posting pictures of myself on it i love watching notifications come up and tell me that other people love my pictures i love checking my phone while i am waiting in line at various places waiting in line is awful whoever told you there is value in waiting in line is lying, and is wrong, and probably thinks they were born in the wrong era okay so dont take medicine or drive a car anywhere, asshole my dad falls asleep in front of the tv every night and has done so for as long as i can remember he talks to people all the time irl and doesnt know how to be true

i dont really believe in god there are a ton of assholes on the internet who dont believe in god why does my phone try to automatically capitalize internet, but not god, i wonder there are a lot of mysteries in the world, i guess what are you doing with your life today? im eating norwegian pancakes and trying not to think about death i bet there are so many people who are like me in many aspects except they also happen to be gross shitty babies i hope im an okay person in most ways i hope i can fuck shit up in good ways i hope youre happy some of the time i hope you dont mind being sad most of the time

idea: an app that replaces all webmd search results with pictures of kittens saying things like hang in there, pal! idea: never being sad again i feel like ive trained myself to see things in a certain light, nothing matters, alls terrible, etc and i feel like ive spent the better part of the last two years rewriting the code in my brain that tells me to think this way idea: shutting the fuck up forever ive disappeared and said goodbye and hello again to some concepts known as me in my life tomorrow looks like quicksand and feels like heaven sometimes theyre the same thing im getting closer to good or at least better which is how i measure good anyway idea: feeling everything idea: climbing out of bed and being beautiful in the world

thank u goodbye <3