Lately, I haven't been able to write a damn thing. But here are some things I at least started a bit...

Another sorry year of existence behind me. The useless days are visible on my floor, represented in their absence by piles of torn fingernails, balls of hair and food wrappers. Happy fucking New Year. The empty cartons of milk and wasted ice cream tubs are starting to smell, as rotten dairy will, but in me is such squalor that nothing outside my flesh can even begin to disgust me. Once upon a time, I aimed for the trash, but it's now lost in a sea of debris that's swelled the room since my life exploded and my various chunks floated down from the sky and fell where they may.

As an act of self-mockery, I found a party hat for this particular New Year. It has been nearly a year since anything meant something. What's not to celebrate? This would be an ideal time to make one of those life-altering declarations and pull myself up from my hole of self-hatred and hygienic masochism, but neglect is my pastime and I don't think I'm capable of doing much else at this point.

Apart from doing word searches, mindlessly scanning the channels, and decaying from the inside out, I spend a lot of time thinking. I self-deprecate, I wax philosophical, I wonder what the neighbors think of me. But mostly, I turn over, a hundred times a day, just how I got like this.

I stare into the mirror a fair amount. I see myself as a curiosity. I am my own personal case study. I get a strange sort of glee--I suspect it is denial--at how ugly I've become. My eyebrows have grown in, my hair is greasy, my skin is a series of rashes. The ease with which I could fix all of that is irrelevant. I see it as who I am now. Soap does not clean off the scum on the inside.

Something else:

when things are bad, I go to my island

where my friends and I lay in palmtree-suspended hammocks

watching the tide go in and out.

we drink our fruity smoothies with paper umbrellas

and we don't watch the time.

I am running my feet through warm wet sand-

blue skies and plastic shovels having obliterated your place in my head-

and then, there you are

in a black wool coat and hat, and a brown scarf.

my friends are gathering seashells to throw at you

and I half want you to get swept out to sea,

but you're not part of my island

so the seashells go right through you

and you stay dry.

when it becomes obvious that you just aren't leaving

and my friends have whispered themselves to silence

I have to go speak to you, get you to leave-

the sun won't come back, otherwise.

as usual, there's not much to say

and quickly I am hoping that no one is looking.

your mouth tastes like mildew

and you smell like stale sex.

there are long hairs on your coat and I know they're not mine.

my fruit smoothie is spilled

the little umbrella crushed

and my swimsuit is down on the sand,

and you...you've left...where did you go?

I shake out the grains and get redressed

As the sand gets warm again under my feet

the sun shines so

that I must squint

and someone pours me a new smoothie.

I go back to watching the tide in my hammock

and I go back to not watching the time.

So there.