the ghosts i experience when i choose to look back

friends and family mean
everything and nothing
to me, apparently. i do not know myself-- he who lived more than three years ago--

and i find myself living from hand to mouth:
eternally, once again, for the first time.

these words which do not so much slide out of me
so much as they
fall,
decrepit-- like a blackdead fetus-child from the spot between a negligent non-mother's thighs--

these words are no longer mine. and i can't help but think that the effort it would take to reclaim them
(these aborted thoughts and coathanger-lacerated old selves)
is both grandiose and minute; miniscule; entirely within my atrophied grasp.

i have taken ownership of nothing.
nothing is mine, nothing is right.
nihilism and buddhism now occupy the same space in my cranium;
capital and lowercase letters, too.

kierkegaard, and the other guy-- the guy with opposing thoughts?
can't remember. the love of wisdom must have left me, for i remember everything
(and by everything i mean nothing--
I REMEMBER NOTHING).

and my meter is immeasurable, and my assonance is nonexistent,
and my rhyme scheme was never there, but add it to the pile and let's watch it burn.
i used to have a midas touch, an editing eye, a discriminating taste; i used to have something i gave away.
a burning torch tossed-- halfheartedly, with no real remorse or heartsorrow
feeling of soulplague-- into the ether, into the black, into the place where

forgotten memories and lost dates and inconsequential components and garbage and seafoam and polystyrene dreams of a child's creation of the futureself all get blended into a grey-snot slurried mess.

this passage has no end; it has no thing to say--
and i will pass on into the next day
(and the next) without a care, without
any promise or hope of a future;
without myself; without you.