try to know me

if you want to know me, you have to read my words. you have to let yourself slip into the sometimes boiling water of my ideas and let them blister and scar your skin. you have to touch the angry wounds and understand the serrated edges that placed them there.

you see, i am more than syllables and more than vowels, but to understand the cracking of my spine, you have to decipher the noise that it makes on the way down. you have to close your eyes and listen to my soft-throated whine and listen to my blood-vessel-popping scream and understand the howls of joy that spiral up my chest from the shrapnel of my very stomach.

 you must take the time to understand each of these separate noises and understand the source of the words comes not from inspiration and not from ideas but from emotions that bleed red down my arms to the calloused fingers that hold this pen.

you have to trust that i am not writing from false and vivid imagination, and you must understand that each flawed sentence and each misplaced comma is only a mirror to the messy and wild way in which i live my life. you see, you will not read my words and string together my sentences and stand in awe of the precision and neat order. you will not marvel at the ethereal clarity.

you will read and you will be placed in the muck. you will find yourself in the whirlwind of my thoughts and the peat bog of my heart. you will get your feet stuck in the mud and you will wipe dust across your cheekbone. you will be thirsty and disoriented and confused. you will be hurt and angered and lost. my words will not bring you to red-covered velvet chairs, sipping tea, drinking wine, tasting bread and commenting on the sunshine pooling on wooden floors.

 my words will not bring you to ballroom gowns sweeping dainty feet. my words will not bring you to serene and tranquil pools, waiting for the lady to slip off her glove and brush the waiting water. you will not be brought there; not by my words.

 my voice will drag you screaming into wheat fields in the middle of a summer torrent. i will drag you with phrases and lassoed adjectives into the heart of the storm, the wind ripping your shirt and plastering your hair to your forehead.

i will bring you heat and flames searing your heels. i will bring you chaos, misplaced and misunderstood and mistaken in every way.

it will be a disaster and it will be dangerous and it will not be pleasant in the slightest. i will bleed this complexity onto a page and i will dare you to fall in love with me. i will sit in a pool of blood, bleeding ink and i will curl my finger and invite you into the chaos, down the rabbit hole.

 i will stand in the middle of the madness, this wonderful terror that i have released from the locked cage of my chest and i will glory in it. i will lean my head back and breathe in the wind and the rain and the dirt that swirls around my legs and up my thrashing torso. i will paint and draw and write and invite you deeper into this wild, maniac world that i have created with misplaced and clumsy words. i will call myself beautiful in the ugliest way and show you my scars and show you my flaws and dare you to fall in and burn yourself on my flames. i will dare you to take my heat and swallow my poison and live in my madness. and most of all, i will dare you to read my words.

read my words and try to know me.