how to be suicidal and live

"What would it be like to treat grief as power? Even our hopelessness as a form of decomposing and falling away that is sacred" - Bayo Akomolafe

this dark moment
is the time for all the darkness in your life
to be what sets you free:
live in your nightmare with the comfort
of knowing what to expect.
now is the time of alcohol, nicotine, and kink.
let what you hate in yourself lead the way:
what you are scared of in yourself, eat it for breakfast.
what you are disgusted by in yourself, burn it alive in the white hot light
of your undivided attention.
this is a test of endurance. everyone loses eventually.

in the beginning you will debate
telling anyone, telling everyone, telling your therapist.
you will think about pink slips and the word "involuntary"
as applied to your healthcare and not your trauma.
in the middle, you will tell your therapist.
you will tell your doctor. you will tell your partner.
no one will have anything constructive to offer.
in the end, you will tell the cashier
and the lyft driver and the guy downing jack at the bar.
no one will have anything constructive to offer.

to live through this, you must be sure:
you must be sure of who you are, 
of what you want, of what the world is.
you will have to choose to build something new
out of the charcoal and limestone and bile and tears
and needles and urine and bottles and blood 
that life has given you. you will have to be sure
that you want to live in a castle,
near the river,
with windows on all sides with sills of broken glass
and floors of salt and retch. 
you will have to know, in your bones,
that the world will tear this down too. 
and you will have to build it anyway. 

from my castle on the hill i have fired therapists and psychologists,
called the trevor project to ask if they think i am crazy,
called my local crisis response line to be put on hold.
from my castle i run a hostel for lost queers and sad dogs. 
from my castle i host poetry readings,
shouting retorts and recourses out to those who see my turrets
and my vain, ferocious heights and think
that this is something to aspire to.
in the heart of my castle is a thicket, baroque garden gone wrong,
so that when helpers arrive like so many trick-or-treaters
i can vanish, and they can still believe.
castles, after all, are fantasies. 

you too can build a castle, and like all structures
developed hundreds of years ago, before electricity
and diesel and cranes and cement, your castle
will be built of raw human strength. 
many die in the building of their castles.
this is a test of endurance. 
like the pyramids, like stonehenge, like jerusalem
others will read the structure as something foreign, incomprehensible,
born of a culture and a humanity that is not theirs.
build the castle anyway; it is the only place that will save you.
and when you climb to your highest room
in your grandest tower, and look out over the landscape
of a million littered miles, you will notice
how many of us stand tall too, flying flags
and shouting across the void.