Chemical Halo

Count the pills

Count the hours

Count the reasons not to disappear

White walls, cold sink, fluorescent haze

Another doctor with another phrase

“Take these twice and you might feel whole”

But they only blur the edges of the hole

Sertraline mornings, numb by noon

Fluoxetine under a pale half-moon

Venlafaxine crawling under my skin

Every little capsule says, “Try again”

But my bones still ache with static noise

A funeral choir where there should be a voice

I fake a smile with my sleeves pulled low

Nobody asks what they don’t wanna know

And every night the ceiling bends

Like it knows exactly how this ends

I wear a chemical halo

But the dark still gets inside

Every bottle promises tomorrow

While I’m dying just trying to survive

So I carve silence from the chaos

Just to make the screaming stop

A temporary kind of mercy

When my mind won’t let me off

Bupropion lightning in my veins

Lamotrigine trying to soften the pain

Trazodone sleep that never arrives

Just another way to be barely alive

Mirror face with the vacant eyes

Learning how to disappear in plain sight

Every warning label sounds like me

“May increase thoughts of tragedy”

And everybody says, “Just hold on”

Like I haven’t been dragging this weight for so long

My reflection looks more ghost than flesh

Held together by scars and medications

And every pulse beneath my skin

Feels like punishment for existing

I wear a chemical halo

But the dark still gets inside

Every bottle promises tomorrow

While I’m dying just trying to survive

So I carve silence from the chaos

Just to make the screaming stop

A temporary kind of mercy

When my mind won’t let me off

I DON’T WANNA DIE —

I JUST WANNA REST

FROM THE WAR INSIDE MY HEAD

Every dosage

Every prayer

Every night choking on despair

I keep searching through the static

For a reason not to fade

But the only time I feel control

Is bleeding out the pain

If anybody hears this

From the shadows where you hide

I know the monsters get loud sometimes

I know how hard you fight

This chemical halo

Could never resurrect my soul

But somewhere underneath the damage

There’s still a pulse beneath the cold

And though the dark still claws around me

I’m not letting it decide

I am more than all these scars

More than every night I survived

Count the pills

Count the scars

Count the nights you made it this far…