No one in my family, not one of my friends or classmates realized that I was going through life asleep.
It was literally true: I was going through life asleep. My body had no more feeling than a drowned corpse. My very existence, my life in the world, seemed like a hallucination. A strong wind would make me think my body was about to be blown to the end of the earth, to some land I had never seen or heard of, where my mind and body would separate forever. ‘Hold tight,’ I would tell myself, but there was nothing for me to hold on to.

Sadness does not turn your world black and white;
it leaves you standing naked on an iceberg
with tangles in your hair and the world
too bright for your eyes.
Worry sets in that someone will notice but everyone is too busy
watching for their own Titanic.

There is nothing quiet about it,
except maybe the holes it makes inside of you
and even those seem to whistle on windy days.
The world yells at you with muffled voices as if you’re standing
in a labyrinth of glass walls and somehow
you’ve forgotten a hammer.

It turns you into a series of nouns, without the adjectives
and without the verbs. You don’t remember
where you misplaced your descriptions, your actions
(under the sink with your emotions and Mr. Clean)
You become:
bed,
shower,
socks,
coffee,
keys,
obligations

You’ll see others stripped bare like you but it won’t matter-
they can’t save you. All you can do is lower yourself gently
into the swirling water and tell yourself to hold on tight.

Ocean, diver, wall, air.

This is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it;

how time twines around your neck, its thorns
digging into your skin so you can never forget
how clinging to a string of hope, threading it
between your spine, and having it unravel before you
in the span of an hour
is worse than any metaphor about nakedness
that you poets will ever write.

This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza
is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
the glass.

You can’t even possess yourself; let alone
the person you see standing before you.

The moon
hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
beautiful.

Time is falling through the hole in my pocket. January
is coming soon, and I have a feeling that he’s never going to fall
out of love with this December.

He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll
send her white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend
that love is a place you can cross state lines to get back to,

but it’s that time of the year again, and
calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
for good.