the day it began, or it didn’t begin,  it was a creeping animal in my bones; a parasite  nurtured
by a universe of ultramarine & unanswered questions &          dying songs, there wasn’t a way 
to know there was a chasm between my body &  my self — a [   ] estranging itself, no familiar 
wound, only a feliform drowning in the waters of a dream, to be rescued, to be alive. whatever
l     o    n     g    i    n    g     meant          was never short.

the morning before i died      the third time,  i became a verse sewed into the skin of an Akachi poem—sacrilege for body  &     half-holy enough for the soul of a sacrificial lamb   for a god—
the one we've both forgotten about like he forgets our kind. but there was always more  of our 
furs to be taxidermied with     despondence. it is terrible to survive as a tongueless sacring-bell 
in a Mass.   it is terrible to survive as a cat with several lives. 

the second time it came, or grew halfway through my chest,      at least something was familiar: 
the taste of something burning  & i was the ember,         a half-eaten moon in a night of terror.    
it was years since the first and   i’d been learning the art of escapism —    i, escapist into a lone
-liness where i am not lonely, burning          ardor into a metaphor for apathy. tachyarrhythmia: 
my father once asked why everything gave me a jumpscare,        including living, & i let silence 
respond to the silence. 

the fifth time i died or the fifth time i sunk into the waters of my existence,      it was about the 
search for sanctuary more than the  search for an exit.          i knew i was the pyre, the phoenix, 
the fire, the constellation of firedust, wraith tinseled with light &  i'll live again with a punctured 
fate & sing odes to myself, &   god, in angst—expecting a miracle of rosewater until there isn't, 
again. perhaps, the constant thing we inherit from our ancestors is expectation. perhaps, there’s
never a reward for being an ampersand between misery      &       insanity. 

the fourth time was mural painting built on hurt.  living,    the cynosure towards disentangling
fire from my tongue, or to exist like a corpse unable to unfunerate itself. hemicrania —  a body
suffused with broken poems, my [   ], a war traipsing to quell & stay & burn & live. google tabs
more psychiatrist than a psychiatrist’s. the definition of therapy meant a road i was chasing   &
fleeing. my mouth, saltwater from a priest's alter. no ghosts cured, no ghosts dead, draining furs.
in another poem, a boy reeks of alprazolam &           promethazine codeine.  in another poem, 
he washes pills   down the sink.

the sixth time it came,               i began this poem all over again.