Who Are You Trying to Feed by Emptying Yourself?

Who are you trying to feed by emptying yourself?

Grapefruit for a heart

& those hands don't grow vines like they used to

& your head is on backwards

& you must've displeased God somehow to have gotten so tragic.

But you can't remember what you did,

Forced to enlist by great something,

So why must you hurt yourself, soldier?

Why must you surrender,

Go gently into that good night for fear of what may happen in the day?

The light shining like bullets on your plastic skin,

& who are you trying to fool with your lab-grown beauty,

With your artificial heart & the gun in your stomach?

You've swallowed the war & it goes on in your gut,

No room for nutrition,

& yet you take up too much space.

Cut yourself out of a magazine

& collage your pieces; scrape your body together

& find that you take up a whole page, your whole bedroom wall;

No negative space to pencil in the organs you're missing

& the neurons you're missing

& the innocence you're missing

& the girl you see in the mirror with his long blonde hair.

No room to kill yourself for the sweetness of sugar,

Subsistence farming & less than you need

& more than you want

& more than you deserve

& what do you want?

Your nest is barren & ruined

& your head is full of false realities

& your skin is full of holes like a plotline

& you know you're an unreliable narrator.

But you can't find the words to fill in the gaps,

Or the flesh to fill in the peel,

Or the bullets to fill in the graves,

Or the chemicals to fill in the pageant queens

& you can't find the viewpoint to make sense of it all