I Crawled Out of the Sewer to Write this Chapbook

some poems by Annabelle Goll

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Dedicated to anyone reading this. I love you all.

TIMESTAMP 7:15 I got out of bed how could you ask me for anything else 7:30 my shadow wont leave me alone and its really starting to piss me off 7:33 I am dreaming of crawling out of drainage ditches to eat your entire family 7:36 off the wall and onto the ceiling as you sleep, Im looking down at you Im watching you dream &;#& I am the ghost that all of those forward emails warned you about in the fifth grade

REALITY TV MAKES ME FORGET I EXIST news flash. a bug repeatedly slams its body against a flickering light. it reminds me of me and you. the night is redder than my fingernails i painted today, inhaling the fumes pretending like id ever try and kill myself that way. ive been watching the tendons in your hand as your fingers move. we carved into those grooves in the barkour names, me and youbut they cut that tree down to build a house or something else less important than love. who cares, i guess. news flash. the sky actually is falling and no one is going crazy anymore. they took this as their cue to leave, so it turned to autumn, weve raked up piles of dead souls and now were jumping in like children. we must just be children. news flash: were all just children.

AM I DAYDREAMING OR ARE YOU REALLY HERE imagine that your eyes are the moon and we are breathing muddied water there is an empty hourglass mounted on my wall because i really dont give a shit what time means think: the fog is trying to suffocate you, the rain is trying to tell you something imagine that your mouth is the sun and we are hanging by our necks between two telephone poles, swaying in the breeze please i just need five more minutes

NOTES 1. She has an infatuation with dying slowly and she calls it being in love with life. 2. It is cold. I am cold. You are cold. We are very cold. 3. I am tired of being sad and tired. 4. I fucking hate lists. 5. Numbers arent even solid enough to hold on to anymore. 6. Write poems for yourself and not for him. 7. Notice the places where your skin is raised and dont be afraid. 8. Notice the way the trees are framed by the light in the sky. 9. There is indeed light in the sky. 10. There is a beating in your chest. Grab it. Hold on. Dont let go.

in my head i constellate the things you said to me and try my best to make sense of it all i stall like an engine in the dead of january amidst the falling snow and snow was like swans if they were migrating geese at least tell me if you remember that winter how we went outside just to throw things and feel our arms move in the air we didnt even have a pond to throw into to watch the ripp les watch the ripples of my stare i see you flinch when i look at you and you drop your head like a child who knows theyve disappointed their mother you never disappointed me I swear you never disappointed me

SUMMER NIGHT bite into the summer night like its an orange, wrap the peel around your fist and punch the moon one time i jumped so high i hit my head on a zeppelin one time i cried so hard i went blind one time i cut so deep i bled out all the madness scream into the summer night like youre being chased by something other than your imagination silence the voices, for just five seconds exorcise the feeling that youre being watched, stop swallow the summer night like its just another pill

JUNE june came like a frost in the night which is terribly ironic, and if I were less of a terrible person I might paint my fingernails with the sun or bathe myself in the shade but instead Ill stick my head in the freezer until my cheeks are redder than sunset if I died laughing it would be wonderfully ironic, because what a way to go, with a smile frozen like frost like june like my head in the freezer, Id have my nails painted in red and my hair tied in a bow, Id die with irony before Id ever let you go

1. I cant remember waking up most mornings I put a fork in the microwave and now everything is so tangibly broken and that feels good to me I painted a picture of a girl ripping her chest open and it was semi-self-representative, accidentally of course I keep forgetting what being whole feels like so when things come together it is like sticking a finger into a frowning electrical socket I am snapping my fingers in half one by one and its like music only even more beautiful 2. you are eating goldfish while googling the symptoms of PTSD and biting your fingernails flashback to when you were sitting on the roof with someone elses shadow flashforward to when you cant remember what time it is anymore youre lying on the floor pondering the implications of the ceiling fans repetitive motion right now it is 3:33 and you are slipping into a dream about being complete you are a puzzle before anyone has even thought about taking you out of the box 3. if i cooked you dinner would you sit and talk to me about the way the light looks when it filters through the surface of a chlorinated pool or maybe how when i sleep for too long i get migraines or how too many prescription drugs make you feel full of warmth?

IM NOT SAYING HIDE BUT IM NOT SAYING SEEK, EITHER if you dont want people asking questions just brand your diagnosis across your forehead, just fucking do it, god watch me stand at the top of a crows nest and scream I ALMOST KILLED MYSELF TWO TIMES and then laugh til my head literally falls off let me just post a screen shot of a screen shot of a picture of someones broken wrist tagged with soft grunge and gore oh yeah, exploit me more thats just SUCH a turn on i will paint my depression all over my face like its a carnival and all these washed-up washed-out outcasts arent just running away from their problems i will wait and i will wait and i will wrap my wrists in headbands and then when you make a list of your mental illnesses and put it in your blog description i will literally fucking kill you

YOU MUST HAVE HEARD ME WRONG you bite down on my heart but think its just an apple. juice trickles out the corner of your mouth like it owns you, like youre the greatest thing to ever happen to it. youre so reluctant to change even when the sky is crashing like the end screen of a silent film, and its the apocalypse, i say, but you assume you heard me wrong. i bite down on my tongue like its yours and were in love, were making love under the stars but thats just my imagination acting up again. you dont really notice how i look at you, do you? youre so absorbed in yourself that you dont notice me biting down on your shoulder, you dont hear me scream that youre the greatest thing to ever happen to me you dont notice as i rewind the tape and you dont realize that none of this happens in real time, you dont notice that the rain isnt still falling.

shut up you are going to keep existing after you're dead, so suicide is not really a viable option goddamn, the sun is so bright goddamn, the night is so full goddamn the sun the night i was right when i said that i wouldn't survive as it was but things have changed, look in the mirror and bite your lip some more you'll wish you could ever feel sexy goddamn, people can be so beautiful but not you right you are going to keep existing even after you're dead so like i said suicide is not a viable option have a conversation with your reflection in the water in the toilet as you try to keep from getting sick have a conversation with yourself over a bottle of pills that youre not too scared to take, but you wont take them stick out your tongue to catch the rain and look at that goddamn sky so shut up you're so fucking beautiful

SKIN the lights were too bright to think clearly but i could see my own breath as it hit the skin of the sky i didnt feel that cold but i guess that was just a trick of the mind the clouds were just goosebumps werent they, just raised cotton pimples that the atmosphere rejected as ugly. i fell in line with their movements because i felt ugly, too you sat next to me on the bleachers and cheered as the team in blue and green made the first down and you threw your head back to laugh, and laugh, and laugh with everyone else i felt the brush of your skin as we returned to our seats. it was different than the skys, different than the earths, different than mine sometimes i feel the fingers of a different hand, i find myself in the palm of some being too great, i can never quite see his face, but only an arm stretching up, like the notes at the end of a song, hitting just right, not flat not sharp. you dont ever seem to share the same visions anymore the team scores again you rise with the crowd like you dont have the discipline to do anything else, like you dont have the nerve i remain seated in the sky alongside the ugly and the arms of great beings reaching out for us, skin like the wind, the lights are blinding

I REALLY WANT TO BE OKAY think of the sky singing sunsets off-key, id laugh at them, probably id take my mirror and smash it into pieces, seven years bad luck but its not like the past seven years havent been bad enough seven years ago i was about to start the fifth grade seven years ago i started to have consistent migraines seven years from now ill be out of college if i make it through without killing myself i want to draw you a picture of how well be in the future i want to scratch the words i am alive" into the side of a car and see what happens will they call it vandalism i think i know the answer but truth has never been more beautiful than when it was dripping onto the bathroom floor i love everyone i love the way that when you lay on the ground and look at the trees sideways you feel like youre standing in the sky, still sighing, dancing on the moon i say this doesnt feel like home anymore" but thats okay because home is always changing and i am changing for the better, i hope

WORDS THAT TASTE BETTER THAN COFFEE i see your hopelessness and raise you a hand, to grab a hair off your black jacket you once stopped me cold with your stare so unblinkingly like a blanket of snow in the dead of winter for the life of you you cant remember its bitter but you like it its old but youve never seen it like this before im old but ive never seen you so beautiful we link arms, tilt heads back, swallow something that burns our throats and makes us build campfires in the pits of our stomachs lets have smores to make ourselves feel better