I came to you split Edges lit, breath thin Something in me Slipping its grip, bit by bit You met me with a clipboard Flat board Hard edge A place for the tremor to settle as text For the mess to compress into lines that behave For the shake in my chest to be filed and saved Margins wide What didn’t fit fell through Lines tight What you kept became truth Every word I dragged up Flagged, tagged, bagged Into something that passed Filed, compiled, reconciled Into manageable facts A syntax of symptoms. A sequence that sticks A language that labels and calls it a fix You translated me Ache into entry Panic to plenty of terms That circle the burn Without touching the nerve A code before contour A number before name A version of me you Could safely explain And somewhere between The mark and the meaning I felt myself leaving Or worse Being agreed with into disappearance Not for me For the file, the stack The system that tracks How a body reacts When it’s bent past Intact You handed me yellow Small sun Soft hum Thirty bright reasons to swallow what’s wrong Morning Night Do it right Take the edge off the fight in your mind Do not feel too much Do not feel too little Stay level Stay middle Stay easy to deal with And I took them What do you do When the room speaks fluent authority And you’re losing the language of you Day two Floor Cold tile Spine pressed Hands misfire Eyes won’t rest Something inside me wrung out, compressed No word you wrote could make it less But the page calls it “expected” Calls it “phase” Says bodies can break for days And still be considered progress made A side effect Soft dialect for a sanctioned wreck A checked box next to “we expect Some lives bend till they disconnect” You wrote “adjust” I felt it tear You wrote “progress” I lay there Staring at a ceiling That wouldn’t stay square Tell me Have you been here Where the air goes thin Where the walls lean in Where your own pulse sounds like foreign skin Or do you just know the words for it Clean, rehearsed, untouched by it Meanwhile There’s another bottle No label No plan No careful tone Just heat Brief relief Something close to my own You’ll call it dependence Avoidance A crutch I’ll call it a moment Where I don’t feel crushed Not cure Never cure Just a blur where the inward blades Don’t do their work I know the cost I’ve seen that end But yours Yours wraps harm in a helping hand Calls it plan, calls it safe Calls it understand While I’m back on the floor with a life that won’t land Fifty minutes In measured confession Decades reduced to controlled expression You nod, you note, you adjust the dose Then send me back to the same closed loop You want to help That’s the script Want keeps you clean When the outcome is this Because intent doesn’t tremble On tile Like I did You don’t feel this You file it The diagnosis saw me Sharp, exact And then it closed, collapsed me to a fact Turned sight to system Truth into track And me into something that fits in the stack Being seen doesn’t end on the floor It doesn’t flatten to protocol I don’t need you to fix it I need you to sit in it When it sharpens When it hits When it doesn’t reduce to something that fits I am tired Processed, pressed Progressed into forms That perform understanding While sanding me down Till I conform Handled Not held That difference That distance Is where I live From tile, from cold, from the weight of both bottles I can tell what you chose By what you don’t follow So write this down too Your help is a hand And your help is a harm And I am the place Where they overlap Sharpen, and then scarred I am the side effect The expected distress The body that didn’t Align with your guess I keep coming back Not because this works But because “something” Still barely outruns The gravity of nothing By inches By breath But I am still here Under the label Under the line Under the language that edits me fine I am still here Not asking for system Or script Or sanctioned fix Just this Stay When it’s real And don’t reach For the clipboard To make it Disappear ~by Unreadhyperion
