WARNING: Poetry reading is bad for your health.

Falling in attraction with people has known physiological symptoms:
a tied tongue, dilated eyes, sweaty hands, wet lips. 

Falling to death with words should be no different.

my soul is shivering, and everything else trembles with it. 
the sky cracks. the earth beneath me crumbles. 
and from here the next moment is undecided:
my body struggles to breathe, 
aims to hyperventilate,
longs to faint.
i cannot stand. i am bodyless. i am, i am, i am.

i am breaking apart. 

long ago i have known that
i am not inhuman, 
not made of flesh and bones,
that the pieces that make me are not so real. 
i am a creature stitched by words and made of figments,
strong with dreams and weak to reality. 
intangible thing, me.

and i am unraveling.

who am i? what am i? is this universe mine, 
or am i of this universe?
i ask, i ask.
what happens when titans meet, when species converge
and siblings surface?
do we compete, do we love, do i love, do i die?
have i been consumed by these tales of fiction
and by this dishonest world? 

in the meeting of words, which words survive?
i have lost myself. i think i have died. 
i am and i am not, me but not me,
unwritten, rewritten and unknown.

i should not be allowed to read poetry. 
i cannot know myself.

Life Update Again, I should be studying 133. I will, I will.

This post was written with shaking hands during Bio 120. I should have known better than to crack open a new collection of poetry during our class break beforehand. And so the words of Jose Luis Vásquez from his collection of gogyohka poetry Dragonfly were half-ignored and half-destroyed.

Some verses were really excellent, okay. And I was not prepared.

Or maybe I ingested a stimulant. Somewhere.

x

And also: 
I think there's something wrong with my heart again, 
which is why I had to carve it out earlier. 
Must leave it someplace for safekeeping, 
until I can figure out what to do with the cracks.