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Listen, when your screams have left fluorescent flashes at the back of your throat, it means your words were made of sparks, but not good sparks. The kind of sparks that light up the room in a way which makes everyone look ugly and tired.

When the back of your eyeballs are crystallizing into sea salt, it means you’ve been crying too much and you’re just being ridiculous.  Listen, stop carrying the memories and the mementos and the dead cardinals in your pockets like they mean anything to anyone else but you.

Jack Daniels broke open a whole bunch of pills and crushed them into himself. He drank himself and he sang Piano Man out loud to himself and his body of glass was gleaming with sweat and midnight unhappiness. Jack swallowed his sorrow and his sorrow was himself.

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Look, stop listening to all those sad songs. Your poems are getting to be all wrapped up in a noose and excerpts from old, crackling love letters you can’t send because who even sends love letters anymore? But how many times have you loved and lost and never lost the letters, so maybe you’re not seeing whatever is really important.

Stop letting the same old dust storm collect and swirl in your insides like that. It makes your tongue grate on its sentences like something cruel. It makes your kisses grainy and your touch scrape everyone like you’re a monster made up of dirty beaches and fractured asphalt.   

Mary Jane was floating very erratically, because she couldn’t see right and she was feeling too much and there was a lot of fog and the fog was made up of her. She saw that there was a flood because the bathtub leapt up at her and drank up all her fog and all her sadness. Mary choked on herself and she was laughing at things that weren’t very funny.

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Jack and Mary were in love once but then they stopped loving each other, or maybe they never loved each other at all. Listen, it’s okay. These things happen.