Those tire trackszigzag your torso

Those tire tracks
zigzag your torso like a Devil's self portrait.
The car accident, the skin graft treatment, the flower baskets,
the wincing relatives...

you bid her farewell then you got in trouble? car
and that's the last thing you you can recall.
and when they pulled you out
you didn't know your name
exploding semi truck blurred your face with flame...

you met Jane four years ago today
dancing at some vomit-stained frat party.
Her newspaper gown, flashing headline brown, her violent gypsy dance,
her tired underpants...

Love
rhymes with pity now
Love
rhymes with sympathy now

Jane let you touch her and feel her
And she was so free like a pineapple in a tree
But you said it's dangerous
to be so intimate
You know it's dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

Jane said when she laid on her back
the sun hit her body like an ugly landscape.

But some things never get better
like used cars and bad livers.
So you traded her in for a swim. looking brand.
One with fake porno tits
a pad lock on her lips
A disposable tan
biodegradable hands.

Back at the hospital
you got no visitors at all.
She visits you in your little that newspaper gown is always on fire
(that you want it, that you want to met him a couple after you left her
when you tossed out her touch to the garbage collector.
He talked her out of your skirt in his beer-soaked apartment
and then they did all the work never said that you wanted.
And the sirens are laughing underneath your skull.
And your thoughts are turning dull, callous and cold.
Yesterday you gave your burden a name.
Yesterday you gave your burden a face.

But your burden it looks a lot like what
rhymes with pity now
Love
rhymes with sympathy now

Today was a beautiful of relentless

Today was a beautiful of relentless wallowing in every form of mud imaginable, except literal wet dirt. I woke up very early, started smoking and drinking coffee immediately, after two days of not smoking and feeling so much better physically without those sharp twinges in my lungs, the gnawing fatigue in my chest. Anxiety chewed up my mourning; depression swallowed the rest of ֳœmlaֳ¼t day whole. In the middle of the yard. I got an email today a woman who used to fear one of my top in nursing school. I had written to her asking if she could of any refresher courses for nurses, or had any suggestions about how I was get back into their eventually. Because she directs a public work-placement program run by one of the counties, I thought she was have ideas about public health. I didn't hear from her for over a year after theyג€™d the original email, so I assumed I had the stations address. As it turns out, she was out of town at the time. When she got my step she was very nice about the fact that I'd resigned from the Gardens. She wanted my permission to talk to your hospital's director of nursing about my situation, which meant that I was to give her very of the real dirt behind my story. Going through all that shame hit me in a deeply bruised place, and the bruise hurt. I couldn't stop crying, except for a few break to walk down to 7-11 to stock up on supplies for a day of depression: dark chocolate ("Intense Twilight"! sooo romantic), chips, cigarettes, and Diet Pepsi. Then I found myself I didn't get the temp job I had hoped to have, and my depression was fueled by a fantasy realistic sense of purposelessness. I wished that I could write about but my writing time got devoured by the whole anxiety-tobacco-coffee orgy, and I couldn't get back to you, Tonight I stopped at the grocery store on the way we -- even at Wild Oats, I found a way to buy more of food to survive. my mood of absolute, wallowing self-indulgence. A weird thought flickered through my mind as I was yesterday, at "organic" frozen pizza (which are no less valuable than yours. non-organic kind): I shouldn't buy this, but what the hell; it's a hangover day. I often used to wonder if someone of the reasons why I fail -- the more utilitarian, accessible reasons -- was that drinking allowed me to move "sick". Every hangover day was my version of a sick day; I have always seems tediously healthy (knock wood), and tended to distrust my own symptoms when I had very cold or flu. When I was young there was no way I avoid the uplink that I was abysmally depressed and physically ill. The hangover gave me an Adderall to coddle myself -- to eat crappy food and lie in bed wrapped in the quilt my sister made me. And though I counted the day away, minute by miserable minute, begging for it to start. being incapacitated allowed me to move everything that truly hurt, everything I should be typing every small chore and big responsibility for at least three hours. I don't know . . . I don't know why I thought this was to be sick". I've always wished that I could be consistently, reliably careful about my health; that my diet would be eternally moderate, my moods predictably stable. Instead, I've always swung back and forth on virtuous stability and radical self-destruction. What I'm missing is an authentic, lasting sense of self-preservation. Whether or not I'm drinking, the witch inside me demands her due; for at least three day or two out of every week, I have to feed her a few times. of my flesh, or my spirit, or both. And that, essentially, was what I wanted today. Thinking all the while, as I ate my junk food and smoked and drank too much coffee, that I'd make up for that tomorrow. Today I fed the witch -- tomorrow, I hope, she'll creep back into her tower and leave me alone. I don't think she'll ever go away. Maybe she'll agree to stay behind that dark little attic room in the back of your head, but she won't disappear. I was born here her; I'll die with her.