Lonely Hearts Chapel

I received a particularly disappointing rejection last week; BUT: it’s the first rejection I’ve ever received that was addressed to “Miss Lonelyhearts,” so I’ve decided that it was cool and that I’ll take it as a win. I’ve also found a bit of solace in this poem I wrote about a month ago, which touches on depression and writer’s block.

The Hope Does Not Spill

Calm, warm blue
beckons me like a husband
from beneath
the sweating white ice.
It commands me
to bring it release,
promising
it will do the same
for me, eventually;
and, although it never has,
I can’t stop myself from
imagining, again, what it would
be like to believe this thing
I don’t remember asking
to be filled with,
which abuses me tenderly,
passionately sometimes
with healing bruises, telling me
that I am nothing without it,
that it is godlike and far
older than I can imagine,
and that I am unknowably lucky
to be its vessel,
to divide myself and slowly die
so it can continue replicating
itself, maybe forever,
replenished by countless other vessels,
some impossibly younger and sexier
than I am–
cells within cells within cells
that don’t technically exist yet–
because I am too stupid
or too something or everything
to contain it, understand it
completely.

It screams at me
for the first time
as I trace its path,
a river down my arm;
it’s so loud
but so impossibly faraway
inside me,
so I cannot hear it
but I know what it wants,
what it always wants:
to be freed, for me
to stab the cold, wet
touchability that separates us,
breaking it just enough so
I can chug its burgundy
on the other side
of the ice, released,
and finally drown in it.
My finger reaches
the end of that river
and strokes what it finds there:
an opaque patch of ice;

my body collapses
like the ice in my mind
as I blink away dryness
and try to cry out
all the trapped, dead, frozen things,
but the hope does not spill from me.

Historical document: my first rejection as “Miss Lonelyhearts”!

Love always,

your Mister