Ecstacy/Hollow Head

I lived several months of my life in the dark, not wanting to turn the lights back on. These endless shadows were beautiful and you blew my mind every night with a drug that, at the time, I wasn’t sure what it was. Laughing at nothing and gently touching your skin just to make sure you were always there. I was high on a product that must’ve been as pure as the words you speak, the tears you weep. It was bliss to open my eyes and feel like I had done nothing. In a world where light doesn’t exist, I thought I’d get used to this but you and me, my love, were far beyond any mind trip that a 70’s hippie could’ve experienced. Are you my witness to all this? I need you. I want you. I love you but…now I think your gone. I didn’t want to be left but I’m in a cage with no fire or stars to light up my vision. I thought it was all real but now that you’re gone, I feel foolish. I fear that nothing had went on. But I guess my fearless thoughts saved time to flip the lightswitch of life and just in time as I watched you walk out that door. On the floor, nothing but syringes and bottles, little sandwich bags; this was a fiend’s dream. I see  the scars on my wrists that you left with each poke and each moment of bliss that I feared didn’t exist. In an attempt to make sense of every event of that lonely spring, I reached down and picked up one of the bloody syringes that crawled on the floor, probably reaking of disease. I hoped for a clue that could perhaps lead me to you. What was this drug that kept me so alive in such a dead place? I hadn’t expected an answer but on the bloody syringe, written in a blue sharpie, read a four letter word that had to be cause of the ecstacy, you and me had so organically created. I read the word, dropped the syringe, and ran out the door after you. Still dizzy from my three month stay on that drug journey. And after all that time, I was still high because apparently there is no detox for love.

Hollow Head

Insomnia provokes me. I wander the corridors of my mind, as I often do, treading barefoot in the thick persian rug that veils my ethereal hallways. I come to halt outside the door that has emblazoned upon it “Don’t go there again”. Knowing what is bound to come of it and yet holding some piece of delusion that insists this time will be different, I enter. Another long corridor branches out and recedes to darkness as the light seems to shy away from the cloudy veil. I walk down, cold stone replacing the warm, inviting rug. I pass the portraits of the people who have meant most to me, hanging there in a mockery of my hope and effort. Bridget MacIntyre, Caitlin Downey, Grace Russo, Chloe Hillman, Esther Dioniso, all horrible crushes that ended in a similar vein. The portraits bear startling images of cruel and wicked faces, where at their feet I felt marred and broken. These pictures strung together to paint a picture. Like jesus on the cross, I see my life segmented to these times where self pity, loathing, took over. Forcing past, I move tearfully onto the worst, most wicked poster of them all, tattered and torn, with a wretched “I Love You” carved into the frame. To have been so close to my heart as to reach out and touch it, then to take your hidden dagger at the time I was at my weakest, my most vulnerable. To kick a man while he is down is a prisonable offense. 

Now on my hands and knees, I struggle to the door with the brass knocker, and collapse in my velvety room of Love yet unadorned by sadness. Three more portraits line one wall, their names hardly need mentioning, and the far wall has a dominating sketch of love reborn, phoenix like from ashes, rising again, to fly freely or burn up once again.