i've got no buttons on this jacket now

can't find the time to fix it but i wear it out anyhow

because it's scruffy and ineffectual like me.

it's been a couple solid months of this self-deprecation shit. which is ridiculous. i'm either writing cheesy love poems or adolescent, self-loathing diatribes. what am i, sixteen?

fuck.

here's a sampling.

love poem no. 376

you curl between my ribs and knees and make the friendliest noises

creaking sweet noises and i

curl around your curl until

my chin is in your hair

our feet touch

you are the smallest magnitude

the expanse of you could contain the scent of galaxies

but you are

the smallest magnitude right now

i feel my organs gasp at your proximity

my lungs and stomach and heart

oh my heart

wants to protect you

to send you every vim and vigour mustered

oh little heart

you have me in you like an antibody

and i'll travel all the earth of you to heal you

you are monarch migration

watching you approach is

the sunrise racing toward oceanside.

see that shit? and that's not the morbid "i'm incapable of anything good and i don't know why i'm so miserable" shit. that shit's worse. it sounds more like this:

morbid self-deprecation no. 118

we have invented time in order to better idealize the lines around events

we have created the mortar that coheres unrelated phenomena

if we could see the space between these things

our escape might be possible

the good people of the world move like sand

all sealed grains flowing

all seamlessly

the good people of the world were rocks yesterday

full valuable shapes

that trees held onto

they were the earth when water held them

but they’re dry

and now nothing grows

i am that thing that does not grow

i have been hungry for too long

now

rabid

i hate them all for starving me

for keeping me too long without a night of wonder

little do i know

that it is my job to feed them

and i have failed

but i guess there are also little moments of hopefulness. the other day, i made a list of things i do to survive my job. it went as follows:

1. try to cram as many flattened boxes into the smallest possible unflattened box.
2. eat french fries with ketchup and steal grapes every time you go in the walk-in.
3. change the words to the oldies to better express your experience.
   i.e. (to the tune of "my girl") i...hate...my...job... what.can.make.me.stay.this.loonnnng? incooooome. talkin' 'bout incoOOome. INCOME!
4. clean fastidiously but pointlessly. arrange cans by colour and size, polish the hinges of the freezers, etc.
5. coach friends' relationships via text.
6. mobile upload pictures of disgusting things.
7. build butter sculptures, or imagine urban landscapes shaped like the stacked dishes.
8. hide in the washroom or the back hallway and fantasize about being 'discovered' or published or SOMETHING that would get you the hell out of here.
9. nurse your own misery.
10. come up with functional dance moves as you put the dishes away.

as much as the above is also kind of miserable, i think it speaks to a certain degree of strength of will and desire to thrive in whatever context.

... i should stop trying to make sense of myself. fuck this narcissism.