"email sent at 10:39 pm”

we both know this country knows the million and plus ways on how to tear your life apart. you keep your end of the bargain of staying silent until your lungs are buried six feet deep beneath the sway of electric wires and city rats. this is how it is: a lot of staring at yellow wallpaper, a lot of spending money that isn't yours, a lot of contemplating, a lot of stealing away time and space like a pest nibbling on bits and pieces of human mess. it's a lot of waiting—dropping spoons and forks like wayward coins on wishing fountain water except whatever visitor you're expecting is dead and deaf to your dealings with god. and god isn't kind. doesn't matter if the girl with the pretty hair you look at during recess sinks her feet deep within his creek of tears like a bath for her tender heart. god wrecks and distresses and he's pragmatic and he's far from a poet and he's a preacher and you hate his voice. whenever his body nears your fingers feel it like the weight of a thousand wild horses making stamps on your skin. god reminds you of self-harm and if you could you'd tell him to go fuck himself senseless—wish him nothing but destruction and death sentences to happiness and watch as he builds better bones. someday you'll grow up to become a hopeless slave to capitalism, a loveless office worker, a touch-starved poet, a delusional adult girl, and you'll learn how to be an arsonist. by then you'll have burned this country to the ground. kindle the flame, scorch the limbs and hair of every perfect body you've ever ruined and slobbered all over by your hunger—the sting of your bitter saliva saline as gasoline oil. if there's one thing you've learned, whatever angels that sang for your ears a few months back have had their tongues cut out and fed to choral sirens with chipped teeth—singing to copies of your soul. how much longer are you going to bite every hand that feeds you a feast? how much longer are you going to keep finding discarded receipts and candy wrappers that remind you how you are back to being a loveless half? that there is, yet again, a large swath of emptiness lying next to you in bed like an obedient wife? all you know is, there is this: you love to ache and it brings your unlovable hand one step closer to your unlovable god.