I can hear movement outside
Construction workers are loud
Electric sockets are buzzing
I hear the pavement is sizzling
Even the water's not silent
The slight waves feel like an earthquake
The children have left the city
Too bad I liked them all better
Because they were the most silent

If only I hadn't removed all my ribs
I wonder if they can hear me

Depression test results

Disorder	Your Score
Major Depression:	High-Moderate
Dysthymia:	High
Bipolar Disorder:	Slight
Cyclothymia:	Very Slight
Seasonal Affective Disorder:	Very Slight
Postpartum Depression:	N/A
Take the Depression Test

Neptune (What Remains Pt. II)

There's an ocean behind my eyes
A rusty latch holds the door shut
Barely closed, the fishes peak out
A scorpion's tail has poked holes through it
As Neptune vows to flung it open
It overflows and pours all on me

Skin of cotton, fingers pruning
Pores that stay moist
Pools are forming
under my feet, all is wet

In the winter, I am slipping
Spring and autumn, it's now mud
There's diseases, dirt and sinning
Summertime; through vapor, blood
Heavy clouds then form above me
and a pact with Neptune's made
To begin a whole new cycle
Of old water that remains

What remains

                                                                                                        Drag your lips across a lie
You know so well that you have now
Turned to a prayer
Just like any other religion
So do you have your beliefs
Leave everything to oblivion
And leave nothing but vestiges

I, too, looked at the abyss
There's uncertainty in our breaths
No one cares if you're a mess
But you can't tell if they're there looking
We knock ourselves off our feet
We can't move for a whole week
And the drugs are just masking the odor

I saw trees being cut down
And spit on my face
I see how people think
How I'm fish or I'm fly
But it's the same
They're wanting to catch you, or drown
I saw evil's sharp blades shining on a dead night
How children stay crying until they can rape us
Just like when we did so to mommy and daddy
Cause one couldn't stop beating
and the other was late

But then someone pushed me
It might've been you
I stumbled and unveiled the whole fucking truth
No, it wasn't a lie
It was just a distortion
The dead eyes of the crowd
were turned back around
The water that was boiling
and that stank shit on the freezer
I had always carried with me
I just dropped them on the ground

Some men love or hate the ego

You just have to humanize it

To face fate or become faithful

I choose to believe in seconds

And in minutes

And in days

And the old idea that maybe what I leave here

It remains

i guess i should leave him

A bear trap
A mouse trap
A poisonous bee sting
Voodoo spells and nightmares
that haunt me at night
They're crawling and creeping
They're all coming for me
to own me, disown me
That shivering spell
that got me in shackles
Can't move
I'm his prey

I'm going, I'm leaving
I guess I should stay

I long for your hatred
Your cancerous stare
No, you don't even hate me
Don't know know that I'm there
Like your spoons need their flames
When your veins scream in purple
so my back has been aching
to feel your scratch there
Drag your nails across me
You're my cross to bear

I guess I should leave him
My fix I can't tear

If your heart could bear it
One stake we could share
But you hold to one mirror
That burns through and through
The only reflection you can see is you
Reign of holy terror that sways over all,
Why take my man like this?
Can't you see he's small?

I guess I should leave him
This feeling's too strong

When the walls are falling
And the skies have clouded
We can see our neighbors
cause they're always laughing
Devil's come 'round knocking
Won't open the door
Hopped into a sewer
Broke into a house
Swam across the ocean
With a single leg
A gun to my head
Chokeholds to my neck
Throwing up empty
This is some real shit
I lay on these tracks
cause I would die for you
But really, in turn
I'd rather live for you

I guess I should leave him
I just never learn

Micah's Drawing

Micah’s drawing

Carl and Erika stood on their living room holding up a picture their 5-year-old son, Micah, had drawn earlier that day. Micah had proved to be a miracle, possibly even a genius, in the short span of his life; he learned how to walk with only 12 months, talk in 14, and mastered his motor skills by the time he was 2. He was polite, sociable and inclined towards the arts, as evidenced by his passion for drawing and Erika’s old Elton John records, propelling his dad to get him a small toy piano for his third birthday, which Micah conquered, dragging his fingers without leave across all ten different-colored keys. A true prodigy, Carl and Erika knew. But this was the first time they were left truly befuddled, albeit disturbed, by anything their precious and precocious little nugget of life had created.

“Is it a third eye?” Carl examined, “It’s most definitely a third eye, you can see the Dharmic influences all over it.” Erika hesitated, as she looked up full of guilt at Micah, who sat at the table eating his ice cream, “It looks sort of… like a vagina, to me.” There were two curved pink slits placed perpendicularly across a white paper with two blue circles on each end that could have been deemed a mere doodle if it weren’t for such an intent trace. Carl doubted himself, “A vagina?” He grabbed the paper firmly with his two hands and brought it closer to his face. “You’re showing your disturbing Freudian fixations once again, Erika, get a grip; look at this” he said as he pointed to the center of the slits for Erika to see. “He must’ve seen this at your mother’s house or something, you know much she loves Eastern culture.” Erika wasn’t convinced but she felt that disagreeing would’ve been perverse, “I guess I do see it…” Carl went on about the symbolism of a third eye, the impact of Hinduism on Micah’s art, and the responsibility they had as parents to provide their son with a sincerely spiritual and religious life that his soul was so obviously craving for. “Remember that time we went to the Wax Museum? He was really drawn to that figure of Ghandi, I remember distinctly.” Erika thought about that day, but could only remember thinking about how hot it was outside and wondering how was it that the figures didn’t melt under such merciless heat, even under the museum’s air conditioner. “What if it’s both? A third eye and a vagina?” “You’re getting carried away, he’s just a toddler, what sort of complex cogitation would he have to undergo to come up with that?”

The bell rang. Erika opened the door for Uncle Tom who had just come from a lecture he was giving at the university, and came in pleading for a glass of wine. “These kids, I swear to God, they wear me out,” he let out like a burden with his boisterous voice before he chugged down the whole glass and then poured himself another. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, they’re mostly smart kids, and I don’t mind going out of my way to explain the raisons d’êtré behind Marxism, but when I have to tell you the difference between Karl and Groucho… we have a problem.”

“Tom, come here, look at this.” Carl walked up to his brother and showed him the picture. “Micah drew this earlier and I was just explaining to Erika the possibilities of this being a third eye and its underlining foreshadowing of Micah’s inner beliefs.” Tom looked at Carl confused for a second, but decided to take the picture and examined it. “I don’t know about all that, the lines and colors and the whole expression seem somewhat arbitrary to me.” Tom and Carl looked at each other awkwardly in silence. “But only superficially, you know, if anything this is maybe even somewhat derivative of Pollock; when I said there’s expression, I really meant it, it’s full of expression and feeling, you can feel it,” Tom said convincing himself mid-sentence. “He has been very irritable lately,” Erika intervened. “Art is the best therapy, I’m so glad he’s found this cathartic outlet so early on in his life,” said Carl proudly. “Poetry was the only thing that kept me from doing heroin during my pubescent years,” Tom sympathized. Erika lit up, “Speaking of drugs, maybe we could call Christina, I’m sure she’d have some interesting insight.” Erika knew Christina, a friend of theirs, would be in the same coffee shop she always was at only couple of blocks down, and would have no problem coming over, so she called.

Christina arrived ten minutes later with a bottle of wine, a wheel of cheese, and her husband, Mark. Mark was usually a quiet man and Christina was wilder, but when it came to intellectual matters, Christina stood back and listened to her husband like he was her cult leader. “I disagree,” said Mark, “this doesn’t seem arbitrary at all, if anything it’s an exercise in geometry and colors, like a Mondrian, but less rigid, you know… because he’s a kid.” Christina, as usual, was amazed by her husband’s analytical process, yet she contemplated something different, “I hadn’t seen it that way, but I have to be honest with you, I keep coming back to Erika’s interpretation of this as a va-gi-na. Micah might be starting to have inquiries about the human body and of sexuality, totally understandable for a boy his age. Don’t be prude, boys, you want art? This is Schiele deconstructed and zoomed in, it’s almost cubist erotica.” “HE’S FIVE!” Erika protested. Carl, Mark and Tom had been sucked into Christina’s thesis, until Erika’s cry snapped them out of it and left them feeling shameful.

Micah had been feeling visibly ill from the ice cream for the past 15 minutes, but the argument had gotten so heated at this point that none of them seemed to notice. Finally, it was Christina -clearly tipsy by now- who approached him on her way back from the restroom, worried at how distressed he was looking. “Are you okay, little guy?” Micah could only grunt in return. She took him over to the grownups’ table where they were all still discussing the meaning of the piece, and as Christina interrupted and said “Erika, I don’t think he’s feeling very well,” Micah’s body involuntarily convulsed forward and vomited all over the table where his drawing still lay.

Micah's Drawing by Alejandro Montano is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 

Selfish