For The First Time. in And The Rest.

Ribs laced together with thick threads of panic, sharp shallow breaths shuttling a throatful of thunder; a thrumming heartbeat humming and unsteady feet succumbing, to drumming a tremulous dance of distress.

Anxious hands seek each other, entwine twisted fingers in white-knuckle knots; shaking shivers running in rivers, resonating right through me like aftershocks.

And my voice vibrates and shakes and splinters and breaks, splitting in fractal fractures along fault-lines of fear, cracking and crumbling in concentric shatter-circles; I sound so small.

I feel so small.

I think I can’t do it every step of the way, trembling in the waiting room and wondering what I’ll say, instead of the truth, because the truth likes to hide and stay buried inside; I dress it up every day behind silence and smiles, I give away little until it’s too late. I let knees hit the asphalt and grit kiss my palms, crawling is familiar; I crawl and bleed and wait. This is the way I operate, the only way I know.

And I can’t, I can’t share it; if only you could listen to the silences I speak, static-slashed silences and slabs of white noise, ripping out the riffs of this torn tattered song. Eardrums battered and bleeding from the heartbeat-bass pounding, resounding; the lullabies without lyrics but loaded with words. The endless nights fractured with frayed fishnet nerves, the edges of ledges that echo escape. The handful of pills that could void every ill, the collision that could shatter me into completion; the seascapes of silver-screened aquamarine which wept windswept promises of whispered deletion.

I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t give that away, I’m tied up too tightly and much too afraid…

…but I did.

For the first time in my life
I reached out before
darkness swallowed me whole
and spat me out in handcuffs on a hospital ward.

And it’s everything, or nothing, because sometimes those things can look so much the same; it’s a first, it’s a start, and just for today… saying that one thing feels so much like something; if it wasn’t so pathetic, perhaps I’d be proud.

I broke my own boundary, my border of silence; I honestly didn’t think I had it in me.