i feel the years eroding, i feel it tugging around the eyes, it burns the lungs

and there is the continuity of days to consider when it all slides by in a haze of work and deadlines and naps in the night to wake in the dark and keep on working still and i've lost equilibrium or my eyes won't focus together and still there are dogs to walk and i've started transcribing my dreams while i'm dreaming again. 

i know nothing beyond this room. i know when it is light outside and when it is dark but they have no relevancy anymore. i drive and type and walk and juggle leashes and keys from body memory alone. friends are left forgotten because i know nothing beyond the immediacy of myself. oh, what shame, to be the self-spiraling one. i am sorry. 


and i've got a sneaking suspicion i've been eating nothing but Froot Loops for three or four days, diet coke plumping my veins, keeping me walking, the walking waking dead. 

i know the tattoo i want. i know why i want it and where and it came to me suddenly in a blinding flash saying this is it, this is why. but forever it will say to me you're a writer and i don't know if i can believe that, haven't you got to be good to affix such an adjective to your name? haven't you got to not cry out in terror thinking of all the books you'll never write because it all comes out so mediocre and that is just not good enough? did Hemingway call himself a writer, did he care? if i am to burn his words into my flesh oughtn't i to be worthy? 


how ever to not cower in a paralytic puddle of shame and sick and want? 


why did he put a rifle to his head, in the end?