I shouldn’t trust myself is becoming my mantra.
I wake past vain alarms, but if I had made myself get up
I would’ve seen the dew, the bruise-purple dawn crying 
in sympathy for me as I dream fevered of the past
and the future rotting from beyond my fingertips.
I give myself purpose in trying to kill all my time
until time kills me back. I attempt to hotwire my brain,
stare at my void face melting off my cage of a skull.
I count the side effects of what I’ve done: the dreams,
how tilting my head backwards makes the world glitch apart,
makes me wonder if I already died, how I believe now
in something larger, how I cannot swallow pills anymore.
Three months ago I became a magician. I learned many tricks:
the vanishing act, fire-eating, how to pull strange objects
from hidden places, incredible grip strength, how to live 
with a knife rammed in my heart, how to rise from the dead,
and most famously, how to predict the future again and again
and again and again and again and again. It became easy
once I learned that I’ll never change. I am starting to believe
I might be a scientific anomaly. I might be a prophet.
I act almost like a human. In the daylight I feed off of sun,
water my plants and do absolutely nothing productive.
In the night I decline my mother’s proposed movie watching, 
I almost convince myself I’d rather run until I cry. I try to bake 
and I swallow a whole continent of Splenda-sugar-cookie dough,
politely excuse myself from God’s quaint little dinner table,
disavow responsibility as one of his many beautiful creatures,
and become something ugly, ostentatiously inviting myself 
to the bathroom. I return with black tears spidering my eyelashes,
and scars down the sides of my fingers. Later I find myself 
shivering by the fireplace in the dead of summer. Blame it 
on the rain, the dark forecast for today. That’s why my bones
are packed with ice, it was a little chilly, perhaps, inside, so
maybe I should take a hot shower and burn it off, slip out
of this dress like lizard skin. I keep pretending to be
a real person, and it does not make it go away. I live
walking around the memory, and somehow find myself
creating an image of it out from the negative space. 
I do not trust myself, that was my first mistake.