There’s 7 billion 46 million people on the planet
And most of us have the audacity to think we matter
Hey, you hear the one about the comedian who croaked?
Someone stabbed him in the heart, just a little poke
But he keeled over ‘cause he went into battle wearing chain mail made of jokes
Hey, you hear the one about the screenwriter who passed away?
He was giving elevator pitches and the elevator got stuck halfway
He ended up eating smushed sandwiches they pushed through a crack in the door
And repeating the same crappy screenplay idea about talking dogs ‘til his last day
Hey, you hear the one about the fisherman who passed?
He didn’t jump off that ledge
He just stepped out into the air and pulled the ground up towards him really fast
Like he was pitching a line and went fishing for concrete
The earth is a drum and he’s hitting it on beat
The reason there’s smog in Los Angeles is ‘cause if we could see the stars
If we could see the context of the universe in which we exist
And we could see how small each one of us is
Against the vastness of what we don’t know
No one would ever audition for a McDonalds commercial again
And then where would we be?
No frozen dinners and no TV
And is that a world we want to text in?
Either someone just microwaved popcorn
Or I hear the sound of a thousand people pulling their heads out of their asses in rapid succession
The people are hunched over in Boston
They’re starting app stores and screen printing companies in San Francisco
They’re grinning in Los Angeles like they’ve got fishhooks in the corners of their mouth
But don’t paint me like the good guy ‘cause every time I write
I get to choose the angle that you view me and select the nicest light
You wouldn’t respect me if you heard the typewriter chatter tap tap
Tapping through my mind at night
The same stupid tape loop of old sitcom dialogue
And tattered memories of a girl I got to grind on in high school
Filed carefully on rice paper
My heart is a colored pencil
But my brain is an eraser
I don’t want a real girl, I want to trace her from a catalogue
Truth be told I’m unlikely to hold you down
Cause my soul is a crowded subway train
And people keep deciding to get on the next one that rolls through town
I’m joining a false movement in San Francisco
I’m frowning and hunched over in Boston
I’m smiling in Los Angeles like I’ve got fishhooks in the corners of my mouth
And I’m celebrating on weekends
Because there are 7 billion 47 million people on the planet
And I have the audacity to think I matter
I know it’s a lie but I prefer it to the alternative
Because I’ve got a tourniquet tied at my elbow / I’ve got
A blunt wrap filled with compliments and I’m burnin it
You say to go to sleep but I been bouncing off my bedroom walls since I was hecka small
We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls
My mother is an 8 year old girl
My grandson is a 74 year old retiree whose kidneys just failed
And that’s the glue between me and you
That’s the screws and nails
We live in a house made of each other
And if that sounds strange that’s because it is
Someone please freeze time so I can run around turning everyone’s pockets inside out
And remember, you didn’t see shit

People will love you. People will hate you. And none of it will have anything to do with you.

We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost, but tonight, let us not become tragedies. We are not funeral homes with propane tanks in our windows, lookin’ like cemeteries. Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go. Let go. Tonight let’s turn our silly wrists so far backwards the razor blades in our pencil tips can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside. Step into this with your airplane parts. Move forward and repeat after me with your heart: “I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.” Make love to me like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did. Go slow. I’m new to this. But I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop without jumping. I have realized that the moon did not have to be full for us to love it, that we are not tragedies stranded here beneath it, that if my heart really broke every time I fell from love, I’d be able to offer you confetti by now. But hearts don’t break, y’all, they bruise and get better. We were never tragedies. We were emergencies. You call 911. Tell them I’m having a fantastic time.

I used to fear the small things
like forgetting to take my vitamins,
sitting in the bath for so long I would shrivel up
and disappear or losing a tooth down the drain.
I still plug the sink when I’m brushing my teeth
but now the world is much larger
and forces words onto your tongue you do not understand
like bills and insurance, sickness and death.
I’ve learned there are much bigger things to fear
than wrinkles on your fingers.

I’ve been told that love is the biggest thing to fear,
but I’ve never been afraid of falling. What I am afraid of
is that one day my heart is going to stand up and walk away
without a note taped to kitchen counter saying,
“I’ll be home soon, don’t wait up.

I asked her if she believed in love, and she smiled and said it was her most elaborate method of self-harm

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo intellectual question you have no interest in responding whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world - profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.

I love her for what she has dared to be, for her hardness, her cruelty, her egoism, her perverseness, her demoniac destructiveness. She would crush me to ashes without hesitation. She is a personality created to the limit. I worship her courage to hurt, and I am willing to be sacrificed to it. She will add the sum of me to her.