body burden

cw for suicidal ideation

I did not sleep all night. The morning
birds began their taunting
the moment I had finally closed my 
eyes. The sky had curdled 
with pink clouds & split the sun's yolk
yellow across cyanide blue—I 
invited the day like bile in my mouth.
When I do not sleep my body acts 
as a sunken ship. Dragging the mind
deeper & deeper into a
chasm of darkest thoughts, at
the very bottom of which,
is you. 
I'm sure I do not exist in your mind
the way you do in mine,
like a flash of lightning I must
will myself to look away from. I wish
it would strike me one day,
& make me so consumed by you
that it wipes us both from existence.
I would be happy then—politely 
shedding ashes into the cavity
of my ribs. 
I have been in love &
I have been suicidal. I am neither now,
& yet these thoughts persist
as if leaching from 
the marrow in my bones.
The poison already embedded
within me—a lethal
body burden. 
It does not scare me. After all,
who am I if not a vessel 
for my own destruction?
I am two eyes boiled over in the mirror,
scorched red by cold water, 
in an effort to appear unswollen &
clean—I do not dare
wonder what you would think
of me now. The exhaustion pulses 
not in my head 
but in my throat & stomach 
as if I had swallowed it. It incubates
inside me like something between a
peach pit & a black hole. 
Tomorrow I expect
it will rip through me,
like a magnet in an MRI machine
in a body.

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