It's Not Poetry, but Surprise Surprise, Writing

I have a problem. It’s not a problem you can see or hear, taste, smell or feel. My problem is myself. I get inside my brain, fuck things up in the vast space. I kick over buckets of self-esteem and chuckle as it spreads bloodlike over the membrane floor. I stack up neuroses in towering spires in the dusty corners that confidence once occupied. While unconscious, I steal into my memory and slip the tiny ones, unimportant ones, so that I might not notice, into my endless pockets and flee. Obsessions crawl through the tiny cracks, attracted to the crumbs of worry left over that the vacuum of apathy missed, crablike on their spindly black legs, sharp teeth clacking as they chatter mindlessly. Dressed in skintight black, I squeeze through multicolored electric passageways into the deepest recesses of my recollections and scribble over some of the clear glass plates in Sharpie, aglow with self-sabotage and adrenaline, and while I’m there I stop to pick up some of the plates filed away in the cabinet that sparkles and shines, throw them up in the air and scream with laughter as they shatter into glittery pieces of doubt and second guesses. Hormones, those little fuckers, spill out of my drooping shirtsleeves and plunk like pebbles all around me, vibrating and pulsing, clotting up the rusting metal doorways to common sense and rationality. Before I depart I draw a ghostly knife from my belt of mayhem and send it whirring through the dead air, whistling a phantasmal tune as it rips a hole in the fragile cloth binding between my sanity and a sparkling void that yawns behind it. It’s only a little hole, so infinitesimal that it cannot be seen with the untrained eye, but every time I visit I fling another phantom knife and worry away at that vital cloth.

The worst part is, as I write I’m already slipping away with my red pen, searching through drawers of accomplishments and records, finding this story and marring it with insecurity, striking through the center a bloody X, the kiss of death for every story I’ve attempted to bring to life.