turn on_tune in_drop out

Turn on: Two ugly little ill-colored pills. 20mg. I’ve officially flipped the switch in my subconscious at the end of the day, when the shadows become reality, when a liquid projection screen is draped across my stomach, the quilt a child would use to hide beneath becomes the thing I hate. I turn_on when I turn_in.

Tune in: Laughter, the crowded, suffocating sounds of a cafeteria in middle school, influxes on words that aren’t there, spoken by tongues of people I don’t know, and don’t care to know. Everything amplifies – the sound of a heartbeat, of electricity moving through the wires of my home. Each loosened leaf hits the ground outside my window with a microscopic crunch. Sleep is not the stuff of dreams.

Drop out: I fall asleep, but keep falling. I fall asleep, but keep falling. I fall asleep, but keep falling.

It hasn’t changed here. My struggles are the same, and I have spent nearly an entire year in the abyss. But something calls to me, despite the things I see when I close my eyes: the girl in a blue dress, frayed rope, a voice begging to just. sleep.

“And I can’t…I can’t ever wake up…”

After an artistic crisis of faith, an Anne Sexton poem shoved my face into the bed and asked for one last request before it died. I asked for it to live.

…They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
- Anne Sexton, The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

My sanctuary has never been my dreams,  it has been my pen. I’m starting to realize I’ve locked myself out using the same key to get back inside. How many people hold the same keys?

you’re gonna love me because i’m psycho.
i’m bare faced and my little girl tongue
is stuck where you can’t see
i’m addicted and flying when you’re crashing
when you’re convincing me therapy and empathy
are the two roads to follow
the insides of success are paved with something far more sour
like the tea leaves you read
you fucking fraud
i’m starving though i might look otherwise
i’m trying motherfucker,
i’m failing motherfucker,
i’ve a simple heel with a sharp, calloused curve,
a short line to the back of the knee, the hills of the ass,
a dip into the open-air back, an exposed nerve, a torn attempt,
a broken neck, a bobble head, a nervous mouth, crooked teeth,
and somewhere underneath that mess, well,
you know. - jmt

Jingle, jangle, jingle, jangle, the rumble of an upset stomach, of bullshit in the distance. I’ve reached the end of the glitter era, of the era that peacocks more than it makes art. Of the era that is in direct violation of the message to begin with.

To the Orphans, who never orphaned me – we begin…again.

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