Walnut Shells

I sat on a cotton leaf inside a sour sugar cube

While the doctor asked me questions.

 

He was late again today.

The walls in this place are thick,

But just thin enough to let me hear a nurse giving him a blowjob

In the janitor's closet across the hall.

 

I told him about how my father would dance on the ceiling

While he drowned the house in oozing cinnamon.

 

He and my mother would blow trumpets at each other

And chew wet and sloppy into megaphones

 

And then she would take her skin off

While Bill O'Reilly spoke through her mouth.

 

Inane insurance commercials would make my ears bleed,

So I went out to the meadow so I could climb the staircase to my room

And juice the pain out of my brain through my arms

Before we went to watch TV

And familiar loneliness spread like an aggressive cancer.

 

Cancer that I irradiated by drowning in the electric ocean

With my brother's vapour hand on my shoulder.

 

My sister's blood-smeared face writhed in agony,

But I couldn't break the glass between us.

 

Incubi and nymphs would sneak in through my window

And we would melt into brutal sensuality in the wheat field,

Stars exploding in our brains,

Brains splattering across the night sky

While we swam in rosy-glowing humidity.

 

Witches used to massage my scalp

While beautiful boys and girls with features cut from angels and elves

Lay across my heaving chest.

Euphoria at the tip of a needle

To make the jibbering lamp-posts shut up.

 

I rapidly grew tired of living in a world

Where fishing in lakes of oil while wearing a suit and tie

Is considered normal.

 

The doctor flicked me on my nose and tried to refocus my attention.

I hated him for it and began to plan his death

And I cried when a spider got flushed down the toilet.

 

My parents woke up one morning and brought me here

To get the mad scientists with their typewriter hammers that beat into my grey matter 

To untangle my anxious knots and make me stop fucking up.

 

That's why I'm here in this sour sugar cube,

Breaking my teeth on the end of my pen,

Blackening my thoughts onto a scrap of paper

Before they rip my head off.