Dark Bits, Unposted

“Even though you’re at your most hopeless, I’d bet those times are some of your most creative,” she said. I browsed my notes app the other night to discover dark bits I hadn’t posted. Sometimes, it’s just not worth the explanation I’d have to give to post these things in real time. Past-tense, but tense nonetheless. Here are some excerpts from the last months.

____

Maybe today is the day
I wake up and think
With delusional audacity
Turning my face toward the window,
hoping to feel some light, some warmth,
some indication —

Every day is the same
sometimes it’s four pm before I use my
voice at all, I’ll realize
My hips ache —
I blame it on the gym, or
The sitting.

But I know it is the sacral ache:
A primal longing to connect
To create
To be woven into

—

Long ago I learned I am not my thoughts
Especially when darkness haunts me
Unfortunately, the price of disassociating
In isolation
Is sanity.

These thoughts are not my desires,
But when they play on repeat
In silence
Their power grows, and like a magnet,
they become
Attractive, eventually.

How do I save myself from myself
When no one is around?
Or how to drown out the sound

-bb
4.12.25

____

How strange, she thought — as if outside herself,
To be reading “the philosophy of
happiness”
While so distracted by the ideation–

How sad, how useless, what a waste
To be once again in this place:
Despairing, apathetic, without the
remembrance of joy

The act of joy is easy to make, to fake
To engage in the movements thereof

And it’s not like I don’t feel love
Especially for my boy

But he asked me just the other day:
He said, mom are you ever really happy
Like truly happy
Do you remember when you were?
Or is it always tinged with pain?

Maybe it’s not
as easy to fake
As I’d like to say.

– bb
3.1.25

____

February 4, 2025 at 7:25pm

I feel manic asf. It manifests in troubled, overly active dreams, but not enough sleep, a sense of urgency in every breath, an unnamed anxiety in my throat and tightness in every muscle, racing ambitious thoughts and nothing to do with explosive energy, senses heightened and intuition off the charts, alarm bells ringing like sirens in my head and any attempt to speak to any of it coming out like a rush of harsh volatility, alienating and pushing away everyone I desperately want to warn/help/wake up — it feels like my entire self is on overdrive, a gas pedal in a sports car all the way pressed down while my emergency brake keeps my body stuck and smoke billows out but the screaming is only in my head and nobody else sees the smoke. It feels like being a bird trapped inside a glass cage, battering myself against the glass until I am both exhausted and unable to stop. It feels like the world is on fire and everyone is drowning and I could help fix it all if only they’d listen, if only I could get grounded and speak eloquently. It feels futile and deadly, but in a more urgent and actively helpless way than being depressed. It feels like I’ll be like this forever, flailing, falling, crying out. It feels like more should be happening, like things should be better by now, but they aren’t. It feels like it’s my fault I am so alone, and like it will always be this way.

____

poet’s note: and this is why I don’t take lovers anymore

I don’t like this feeling at all
Spiraling

Hands cold and damp, eyes darting
the echoes of fear and familiarity loud
inside my head

Is it intuition or self sabotage
Something changed last night, the vibes
were off
You didn’t call me darling
Or heart a morning text

You left me on read.

And I don’t know if it’s just in my head
Or if it’s something I said
Or if I shouldn’t have let you into my bed

Round and round we go again.

-bb
11. 2024

____

Today, I got out of bed.
And did stuff I’ve been putting off for 20 years.
Like college.

And even though my body is sick as
shit, my ears feel and hear like they’re
under deep water, my joints and
muscles ache and my head throbs,
even though my own stress and
depression got me here–

I got out of bed today. And I did other
hard things, too.

-bb
10.17.24

____

I enjoyed my brain today, didn’t quiet her voice, numb her banter, scream and run from her narrative … I welcomed her, was awed by her clarity, found joy in perception.

… for anyone who has been crushed by the despairing within their mind, who has for days or weeks been unable to move from bedridden emotional paralysis, who has desperately blown an enormous cloud of medicated smoke across their own inner landscape — to emerge is to breathe clean air again.

-bb
10.23.24

____

What’s your weakness
Your worst quality
They asked her live on TV
She didn’t answer, not really
So I ask it now of me

It is my sadness, my deep inner longing
That makes me weak
The way I search for joy, or force it
Before I speak
The way I glitter for you
But never for me

My brain does not believe the things
My heart tells it to say

The sunlight falls across my face
It’s now my bed is laid
Every morning it shines on me
And I have to fight myself to stay

“The worst is when I wake up crying,
It happens more these days,”
I said at work
The things we should not say
“I hate that too,” he said,
and someone added, “I was joking but
that is sad”
And he couldn’t come to work the next day.

The sadness is a wounded leg
Halfway through the climb —
Ambition should not be a weakness
But in this case,
It’s mine.

-bb
11.2.2024

____

and now all of these people are dead.

sometimes I wonder if ever I was
as happy as
the memories in my head
did my smile ever
really grin as big as it did
that one time?

I remember smoking weed
with all my favorite men
the way Jake taught me how to deal with blend
(but always rolled me plain)
and how Jonathan liked everything organic
(except for his cocaine)

times like these I was all the way me
like slipping away into the alley
undoing my shoes and sitting with bare feet
life of the party but more at home on the street —

I remember the dancing
a sense of nowhere to be
no matter where I was standing,
the sound of the sea

I remember that girl, feeling perfectly free,
I remember men that allowed her to breathe
I remember the yearnings that led her to flee
and I wonder sometimes if she still lives inside me
(while they rest in peace)?

-bb
11.2024
in memory of Jake Campen and Jonathan Lowis, my dearest friends and sweetest conspirators

____

or whatever — anything but this
stagnation, this silence, this petering
out of my longing cry

this endlessness, this muted weighty
nothing — it feels like where manifesting
came to die

-bb
12.1.2024 at 12:33 am