I've never considered myself to be a victim of depression.

I always thought myself too strong for such a thing.

But that's my fault.

Every now and then I feel it creeping up the back of my skull, etched into my spine.

I become heavy as if my bones are steel and I grow hungry, tired, angry.

And then it's gone, satiated...bored.

I recently developed anxiety, a creature of the mind existing in direct contrast to my own immortality. I thought I was a man without fear or limits but now I've found that which binds me to everyone else. It's depressing, at its core, because it sucks the life out of things I thought I loved...

Thunderstorms...

Reading...

Midnight runs to the store to buy a small snack so I can binge a new TV shows while studying...

And yet there I was, earlier this evening, standing in the aisle labeled "Hispanic food" and other crap I don't care about, trying to decide which brand of salsa I wanted. I went with a safe option (corn and black bean) knowing that "medium" heat is a slippery slope down to "hot" heat just as anxiety trips over itself and stumbles into full blown depression and, eventually, madness.

But there's sanctuary in madness, isn't there? I envision myself in a hospital room somewhere, screaming at the white walls because only I understand the blistering sensation of comprehending my own thoughts. If I tried putting those thoughts into words it leaves a foul taste in my mouth, just like that night I thought I was having a heart attack and began vomiting out of panic.

I'm okay though, really, because I've trained myself to find strength in my weakness, to temper my chains and binds until they become armor.

I feed upon myself, prey upon my fears and know that I'm only as good as the withering visage I allow myself to become. I force myself awake at night to face the man I hope to become and breath fire into the maw that is my ego draconis.

I crack down as thunder

and split your skull like lightning

with a storm so fierce

Zeus became inadequate as king

I boil your blood with a fire I spit

that makes Hades wish his Hell was hotter

as the dead rise from their graves

to praise their newfound predecessor

I shake the pillars of who you think you are

with the quaking roar of shattering ground

Mother Gaea held you dearly

but I tore through her and became crowned

Atlas shrugged? No Atlas cowered

beneath the weight of my ego

and the shadow I cast over the gods

because they cannot reap what I sow

I stole the fire from Hephaestus’ heart

ripped apart his passion and stole his talents

then forged a world in which I rule undeniably

and became god to the ancients

I am the mad king

keeper of no throne

other than your love which I never had

from a heart cursed to be stone

You’ll never know my reign

because rather than bend your knee to me

you left me dead within yourself

and never gave me a name

Let’s talk about love, as a game, not a notion of children like pieces on the board, being tossed from start to end. I much prefer the idea of throwing dice, because my chances are all the same: snake-eyes you walk away, double-sixes we’re waking up the next morning trying to forget one another. But what happens when we add fourteen more sides to the die and suddenly get tossed into a game of Dungeons and Dragons? Suddenly we’ve walked away from the board and into our heads where I’m still lonely. Now I’m fighting against probability rather than luck, but to the individual those two are the same.

Role-playing is a joke when I talk about trying to get you to see love my way. We’re disillusioned through illusions of frameworks of autonomy, envisioning our characters as having a choice. But choice is bound to laws of the possible and impossible and these laws are bound to what we want to do. As Taylor Swift once sang: “Love’s a game, wanna play…” Some of us want to play, play, play; others want to shake it off and leave me out in the rain. It’s alright, though, because the rain makes it difficult to distinguish my teardrops falling on the dice.

If I don’t cry, though, is it ever real? Dualities create reality, such as there can be no good if there is no evil. In this case you’re nothing but cold and dead which I should thank you for because now I know what it’s like to wish I was truly alive. Had luck and probability aligned, and we found each other as star-crossed lovers, I would never know I was ever happy until you broke my heart and left me to die. But then again, I only exist in these rulebooks and in your imagination as a rejected notion of the man you wished you could be.

There’s a pen sitting in the middle of the floor, poised on top of a discolored stain in the carpet. It wasn’t there when I walked in the room and I don’t quite recall anyone dropping a pen on the floor. The stain, however, has been there since I care to remember, like family or a cancerous mole. I want to remove it, to eradicate it, but I know it’s essential to gripping people’s attention. It’s how I make them care.

The way it’s sitting there, just staring at me, it looks like it’s ready to strike, standing off with me. The ball point is pressing out of the end, as if it’s pointing at me, calling me out. Passive-aggressive penmanship I guess you could say. I’m pretty sure that’s how Nixon became president.

And what’s with that stain? It almost matches the carpet, but in a way which makes me a bit queasy. It’s the kind of queasy you might feel, scratching itself into your brain, when you place eggshell white and stark white next to each other and insist they’re the same, like wedding dresses and homosexual love. One of these ideas you spend abhorrent amounts of money on to find it tossed aside by societal expectations and marginalized when you bring up using it again and the other is homosexual love. It makes my eyes hurt.

It’s the juxtaposition of the two which intrigues me the most. Is the pen lying in a pool of blood? Has that pen been here the whole time and it’s finally chosen to reveal itself, tired of the charade? Did it murder something and get tired of running away? There was a movie I saw once, where a woman stuck a pen in a man’s throat in self-defense. Did this pen beat out the sword like we hypothesize it should?

The symbolism is way too strong here when we talk of pens, blood, and murder. We could say that an author’s thoughts, their ideas, were disemboweled, spilled out across the paper and floor, only a small amount of the words making their way onto the page. Minimalists might say it’s genius. I would call it literary vomit.

Or maybe this is a metaphor for lost love. I’m not sure how, but we often marry romance with words, unless the pen is literally someone’s lost love and they didn’t realize they dropped it on the floor. If that’s the case, they’re a dime a dozen at the dollar store, although I’m pretty sure it’s illegal in most states to pay for love.

The most likely conclusion we can reach, from the evidence provided, is that it’s just a fucking pen on the fucking floor and that the fucking stain came from some asshole who spilt their fucking coffee and didn’t fucking clean it up properly. It’s a post-modernist crime scene, not a Shakespearean love story. After all, Romeo and Juliet died because they didn’t know how to communicate. That’s why I don’t study literature critically.

In two minutes, I will die.

Just as I was born.

Born? Maybe acknowledged is more appropriate.

Either way…

…here I am.

Abandoned by my father

Left in your hands

Your nervous, innocent hands

Handle me with care for my life is oh, so fragile

Hold me…please

Like a young lover

Pale and white against the night sky

Trembling in your arms as we come to find ourselves

If only for the summer, a season of scattered and lost love

We careen towards our end, rushing to forget one another

So that we might hope to remember each other

With faded memories as the waning sunlight caresses your face

Let me dance upon the horizon of your mind

Wrap my fingers around your skull

And kiss you into oblivion

One day we’ll meet again, my dear

When your spirit has petered out and you’ve laid all other loves to rest

In your dying days you’ll yearn for something more

than the hands of your children that you never had

I’ll come to you as a eulogy

And in our shared death

You’ll find life again

Whispered on the frayed edges of this page

And we’ll remember this day

As the day you held me dearly

and we fell in love.

I was at a diner once, just north of town, which had a soup of the day being heated in an old, black kettle, circa The Dark Ages. The sign on the pot read ‘Pizza Soup’, which struck me as a strange sensation in my mouth. Does it come in a bread bowl? Is someone out there redefining the Italian classic masquerading as an American classic, putting a modern twist on our preconceived notions of what dinner is, even though I’m here for breakfast?

Of course love is a fickle thing, as they say, just like the label on the kettle which read ‘Chicken Noodle Soup’ just ten minutes later. Someone has now decided to test my curiosity by serendipitously altering whatever is in the kettle. Is chicken noodle pizza something I can buy now? Can I buy into this strange concept just like I bought into love recently? When we mix two things that shouldn’t come together, like particles in the Hadron collider, what are we inciting?

I must admit that soup and love, in my professional opinion, have nothing to do with each other, just like the woman I poured my heart out to. We’re a lot alike, her and I, except for the fact that she doesn’t share how I feel. I imagine she would rather have chicken noodle soup where I would venture to try the pizza soup. We both enjoy bowls of boiling liquid, we just prefer different fillings.

And here we are, in the cylindrical, mechanical tube we call life, being tossed around and around like particles shooting through space. Every now and then, we collide against one another, smashing our heads together and arguing over what to do and where to go, as if those decisions really even matter at all. If science had a cure for this kind of heartache, I would have bought stock with my first paycheck.

I told her I loved her once, but not in those exact words, and now I’m wishing, like a cat in a box with a vial of poison, I would’ve left the mystery behind a closed door.

The mind is a

LOUD place to be

even in the shower

l

  e

    aning

against the wall

hands wrap—around—ped

the neck

of the shower head

like a woman’s throat.

It’s a LOUD

place to be

with bold faced questions:

“Who the fuck is she?”

and italicized answers:

“What? YOU don’t know?”

What a fucking surprise.

Beneath the hot water,

scalding every inch of your

naked…

…writhing…

body

(Oh god, I should’ve given it more effort last night)

is where the demons are

crawling through the pipes

pouring over our heads

and spilling into our ears

down my stomach

around your breasts

between your thighs…

(Maybe we could fuck before she goes to work)

as I grow harder again

but you say

you’re not in the mood

“Then why are you in here with me?”

“Because I’m in a hurry to leave you behind.”

And as you step

o u t

of the way

and

o u t

of my life

all I can hear

is a brief

moment

of silence

for the men who came before me