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Poem Details  

Title: Relief
Date Submitted: 11/17/2007
Email: crimson_surrender@hotmail.com

 
Poem: This is the day of relief. The day where I can look forward to the time where I can blend seamlessly into the blackness around me. This is the day I don’t feel so abnormal, where there’s no one to stand next to and there’s no one to see. My curtains are drawn tightly, against the life outside and I’m not sure if my door is locked more to keep them out or me in. But I’m sure it seeps out the gap under the door, this bitter rankness of human decay. This decomposition process seems unjustly infinite. The fan on full speed can’t drown out the ringing in my ears and the languid air that stirs against my skin just isn’t sharp enough. And I sit flushed and hot with racing heart and mind, and I’m wondering when heart failure will kick in.

This is the day of relief. No one has to see me today. One hand is tied down to a pen, grateful for the purpose. My whole body, channelling the feeling, pushes the pen into the page, wondering how hard I have to draw the lines to drown it all away, knowing that there are so many better tools than a pen. Without the pen my hands flit and dart between skin where I can push and strangle my flesh hard against the bone or dig my nails deep to my core. How do you get through something, when the only way you’ve survived before is that paradoxical final option left open to you? The philosopher would question if that would really make this end. And I’ve not left this seat for hours now and it’s nearly time to take my meds again. It's all that punctuates my days now, but there’s no sugar coating here. And this living is too constant. I’ve done nothing but rock with nails dug deep as I battle my desires and my fears. My nails dug deep into my scalp, I think I’m bleeding again, I'm thinking that dragging my nails down my face might somehow make this better. Sometimes I just want to breathe without these tendrils that strangle my lungs, without these shudders from a wretched soul that is bound to it’s body in a final insult. Sometimes I just want to stop breathing. There's no point. Just a person for whom I hold no value or respect, a present to escape, and a future that is just the same, on and on and on and on. And I just can’t see how this kind of living is going to work. And I’m scared of that end I see, scared of the consequences not to myself, but to others. I am scared of how this will end, or worse, that it won't. But surely it has to, when I’m here and I’ve been taking my last breaths for months and it’s still just winning over and over and over again. And this is my relief?...