SEASON OF RENAISSANCE.

II.

RENAISSANCE MEANS RE-BIRTH, but my DNA refuses to rearrange itself and whenever I try to carve a new life, I end up in the same graveyard as last night, with darker corners and softer ghosts telling me to go back to my casket and curl up inside. I'm too big for the casket, I scream, my legs don't fit. cut them off, the ghosts tell me, or go back home  ─ a hesitant silence: I've broken everything in my home. at that, my fingers slacken around the leash. shadows flutter all around me, swallowing me down with cyanide grief. my life is floating in front of me like a thousand bad memories clumped together into an unhurried hurricane. am I dying again? / the sky looms over me like a mother who's tired of listening to my maudlin cries and the ground claws at my feet like a father pulling me into his plumbago-colored dream. come back home, they say. I give in and let go, the shadows try to clutch at my arms but I fall apart. I always do, in the end. the ghosts sweep my pieces off the granite, and my hands try to wade through the cluster of useless chromatin in front of me. it spreads out like a labyrinth and fades away like a corpse in memory. when I wake up, I find myself lying on a bed, facing the ceiling's sickly blue paint. my pale legs dangle from the wooden end, I'm beginning to think they will never fit anywhere. I turn on my side, there is a notebook tucked under my pillow with my heart taped to its cover. on page 41, in little, frail letters, somebody has scribbled i wish u were dead over and over again and in the stickiness of the night, I repeat to myself: I wish you were dead.

RENAISSANCE MEANS REVIVAL, but what needs to be revived has been destroyed too much already, and the leftovers have found a home in this verse. I was the one who did it; the killing part. thought I was doing myself a favor when I left it to sink to the bottom of my gut, thought I'd be safe because shipwrecks can't rise, they're only heaved up. but it was never that: a shipwreck ─ it was me, as ever, with red-rimmed eyes and seaweed skin and I knew, I knew all along. / I saw it the first time, in the bedside mirror, staring back at me. it looked like a can of cherry cola about to be tipped over someone's head, a galactic clutter halfway through a crash. I broke the mirror in hopes of breaking it, prayed to god it remained six feet under for a bit longer because I needed more time. the second time I saw it hiding in one of the pages in my notebook; it had changed just as much as I had. we both shared a growing resemblance to a house burning in the dead of a lively christmas's night, the sound of a bone cracking its way to a fracture, the rasps of a weak, failing chest pressed under one's palm. it looked uglier. but ugly things have always looked good on paper so I wrote it in there, squeezed it in between the loops of my Fs, nestled it in the crook of my Cs. I ran my pen over it until the misery got too repetitive and I was convinced it was going to stay there forever, trapped, with runny black ink skin and rose gold rashes. then, as a final goodbye, the very masterpiece: i wish u were dead. i wish you were dead. I wish you were dead, i wish you WERE FUCKING DEAD U DUMB BITCH. I dog-eared the page ─ 41. 

(a postlude of sorts?)

maybe renaissance is about banging your head into the wooden crevices of the desk over and over again until your brain momentarily disconnects. maybe it's about shutting yourself inside a small cardboard box and loading it onto a cargo ship that's destined to sink. maybe it's about feeling the same thing over and over again, in different colors, maybe it's about writing the same thing over and over again, in different words. maybe renaissance is about letting the monster in your brain take over, letting a swarm of lone dragonflies hover above your premature grave. maybe renaissance is about death, and death is about renaissance and I'm really into both.

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hi guess who decided to be an absolute fucking mess in this poem