That Four-Letter Word. in And The Rest.

I thought, for the most part, that words were my friends.

Puzzle pieces with interlocking edges, interlacing in landscapes of rhythm and rhyme; sketches of shadow in shades of phonetics, a resonance of violence in vivid visceral verbs. Scooping smooth, shifting handfuls of sand-grain emotions and sifting them, fingertips finding the flinty glass shard to effect the reflection of what is inside. The cool clay of self-expression can sit softly submissive in the heat of my palm; stack them up and knock them down, words are the contours and corners of my world.

But this four-letter ball of barbed wire, this fistful of brambles, draws blood.

It sews my lips shut with stitches of scarred scabbing sutures; spiked spines spear the flesh of my choking throat and it’s stuck there, claw-hooks sunk in sharp and serrated, thorny gorse claws tearing tracks in my tongue.

(help)

(help me, please help me, I’m so close to the edge I can feel the fall and what’s worse is I want it; I’m scared of myself)

Something stamps on my sternum when I try to see futures further off than today, smashing my ribs into splinters and shards and grinding them with hard heavy heels into the pulp of my heart; savage shaking shockwaves of physical pain at the thought of another week, month or year; still here. I can’t remember what a resting heartbeat feels like, it’s constantly racing, constricting, convulsing; I can’t remember how to breathe without the rapid echo of panic a rattling ricochet in my throat.

My head is an open wound split wide across the skull, I keep trying to stuff it with the cotton-wool and gauze of routine and reality but nothing stops the bleeding; streaming liquid self-loathing still runs rivers of vicious viscous crimson down the sides of my face.

I can’t stop doing dangerous things. I can’t stop wanting to leave just the same way I’ve lived, solitary, silent and selfish; a pointless worthless waste. I can’t stop wanting to tear myself out of existence along the perforations of my myriad mistakes and leave the smallest hole I can; a little well of resentment and grief that I hope will just heal into scars of relief.

(please please help me, I’m drowned in this spiral, I’m over my head and it’s so overwhelming, sometimes I think I could just beg anyone to be there for a moment, just for a moment, so I could throw it up all over them, as though getting it out might stop me feeling so sick)

How dare I even wish I deserved to be helped, when I’ve spent a whole lifetime destroying myself? I don’t deserve anything but to shut up and swallow the cold caustic consequences of my own worthless weakness; all that I am is entirely my fault. All those endless years rebuilding, relapsing, continually collapsing under the unsufferable weight of my arsenic mind; I built my own internal torture chamber and I’m so completely, cripplingly, ashamed of the mess that I’ve made. I don’t know what to reach for, I don’t know what I think could save me if I can’t save myself.

I just want it to be over, I just want to be free.