Robert J. W.

@robertjw4688.bsky.social

1100 Followers 583 Following

Poet, writer, artist, mental health warrior/advocate

FYI: I might leave Bluesky tomorrow and may even deactivate my account. The deluge of negativity on social media (my own included) is ruining my mental health and I need to curb my social media addiction. I'll still post my poetry and art on Instagram and Substack (@robertjw4688 on both) for those that want to keep up with me and stay in touch but if not, I understand. Just putting this out there in case anyone wonders why I disappeared LMAO. I love you all and please take care of yourselves!
"Happy Shrug" The bubblegum grass rises and entwines with the heart. These children play as memories metamorphose into goal posts, headwinds be damned. Relaxed lips recite prayers to whatever god finds shelter in the fog and if She answers, we shall heap praise onto Her whisper and if She is silent, we shall move on and let the dented moon dim so we can see.
"A Scream Where The Future Should Have Been" We departed from the party where we were the only patrons and drove into a metropolis where rising intonations dwelled in every alley way. Our clothes reeked of natural combustion and our breath gave the world something we could never take back. There was a scream where the future should have been. but our throats were sated so we blamed a metal song and it's one to which I still hum along without your harmony or my cracks.
"Sometimes I am the Problem" I am furious at the noise from which I refuse to remove myself and I am despondent at the surrealism of the razors that I'm too scared to throw away. Sometimes, I am the problem. I could conquer every atom with nothing but a cloud to my name but I refuse to learn how to drift like it can because the weight of stasis seems more like a cold hug than the abstraction of healing.
"Handcuffs and the Absurd" I've seen so many people try to put melancholy on a pedestal. There is nothing romantic about depression; it is toxic as the bile in the guts of those who feel they need to eat themselves to stave off starvation for a day or two. There are indentations on my wrists from handcuffs and the absurd; I am not consistent. I am an infinite amount of heroes, villains, and bystanders that are just trying to be patient with one another before the world they share decides to ride itself of them in self-preservation.
"Roadside Distraction" I'm broken down on the side of a dirt road with fingers caked in crimson oil and a flare ready to light on a lifetime of gasoline. The heat sprints in place next to me, shouting bad news and misdiagnoses but all I hear are the static dirges that play from my AM radio. I wish I still smoked so I could at least relax on the hood of this vessel, unabashed for the apathy I wish would hurry so I could faint at its feet.
"Self Iconoclast" My burned hands try to grasp the powder that was once a better day but the searing present is overwhelming and even the future slips through my weakness. This body is an error that collapses into a sea of greater problems and this mind picks apart this soul as a hobby because neurosis is the iconoclast that can annihilate even the most invincible reason.
"Chewing on Concrete" Can I learn to embrace the fractured glass instead of grinding it into the shivering earth? My blood is the color of rebellion and I'm smearing it onto every indifferent day. I feel my lips curve into shapes with infinite sides and the concrete on which I chew tastes sweeter if only for today. The odium that crowds my every scar seems more like a colony of ants and I chose to rock them to dream instead of forcing them to suffocate.
"Pushed Against the Storm's Sigh" I lie on the curves of my skull in defiance of the cyclones within. I will eventually wither, pushed against the storm's sigh but I hope my last breath fills me with starlight instead of the salt that dances in the cuts on my brain when the days seen longer than childhood. I swear the lights in the sky are starting to hum and if I harmonize I think I will be okay.
I'm a few days late to the party but I am beyond honored to be featured in the anthology My Mental Health! It is a collection of poets and writers sharing their mental health stories. I highly recommend checking it out! This is NOT a poem that I have featured; it is a raw flash memoir about my lifelong struggle with mental illness. Special thanks to Robin for putting this together!
"The Trauma of Movement" There's a trillion needles jammed into my wax breath but I struggle to find a single point. I cannot handle the good life and the bad has left teeth marks on obsolete skin. A shallow sleep washes over the crib and I cannot tell if there is a party for me outside these bars or if the world is ending yet again.
"Unsolicited Advice From A Mentally Ill Man" Supercilious meat is stuffed inside pristine suits and muddied tank tops. Only the dust is infallible. So many people have grafted gavels onto their beating hearts while screaming "peace" into meditation halls thinking that it will save the world but the only thing that can rescue us is to shake hands with every dirty window and open our minds to welcome the eye of the storm.
"Hungry Night" I'm twitching on the edge of a world that I forgot when I remembered how to give eulogies instead of sighs and I'm shedding the rainbows that formed after storms of wrinkled rain and sour snow; I replace them with the gray matter that falls from my eyes and tongue after another morning wishing the night would devour every umbilical cord and the happy songs to which they are attached.
"Stolen Blood" I'm not able to tape a cardboard sun to a drowning midnight and claim it's a "nice day." I wear my maladies like fleas on the coat of a shivering stray and though I try to douse myself in kind words and the laughter of decades-old children, my blood is always stolen but is it the insects or the broken glass in my rumination that incriminate themselves by leaving this life shaken in a dirty stein for the universe to binge?
"Vacuum of Propaganda" From the depths of fog and grease, the halos tightened around their necks resemble charms made from the good they were forced to mime out of desperation to be liked and it pulls us in like a vacuum of propaganda. When those halos inevitably crack and their blinding lights collapse, I hope we can truly see the rust on the swingsets and we can fix them without dwelling in the potential tetanus, soaring into the air like the children we deserve to be.
"The Defenestration of Crumbs" Itching daymares nestle into my heart line. I scratch at these creations when I should be defenestrating them to the sidewalk outside my apartment. Fractured glass is a symptom of the will to live but the question is do I pick up each shard and examine them until they resemble a DIY prison or do I walk across these fragments on bared life and bleed until I understand?
"Your Beard is a Batch of Angel Feathers" I can still feel the carpet on which we played with a plastic humanity. You had a million voices and each one made the calendar laugh despite the fleeting pages. When I was five, you told me to never hate; I fail quite often but in a crevice of my soul, I keep that advice and on days when the world seems to spin too quickly out of spite, I take your words and place them against my cheek as if they were your lips, as if your beard is a batch of angel feathers that can carry me back to that carpet where we can twist our voices and drown out the universe.
"Looking At The Same Gravestone" She and I would putter across burnt rainbows. The ash and the greed would fill our mouths every time we kissed. I swear we're looking at the same gravestone now but the name's we read are different and the comfort of the casket's shelter seems to decline along with the memory of the summer when we were both alive instead of a circus for giggling mourners.
"Always Reaching" I've come undone so many times that my flesh weeps for my bones to return though they are connected in a flickering eternity. There is something for which I am always reaching; sometimes, it is a warm word and other times, it is a work of art on which I've been working since a sepia womb dropped and bound me to the train tracks. I bless the degrees of my scowl and fan my smile with the feathers I plucked from a god's back with a sweating palm.
Rain drops clench the earth in a fluid hand as spring cedes to summer's breath.
"The Great Morgantown Novel" I've been told I have novels inside of me but I think right now it's just the same word repeated with the letters slightly jumbled yet I know someday there will be a climax where it all ties together and that single word becomes a sentence becomes a paragraph becomes an epic story about a boy who rose from his filthy crib and crawled into his own arms.
"Stoic Wave" Hearts and sickles float in a roseate river. I'm in the deep end, collecting pebbles for people who forget my name the moment my pen writes their purities then lifts from the page. But it will be alright. I wave at the fiend perched on my shoulder with love despite the black holes on their breath and the incriminating matter of which I consist.
"Fissures Filled With Silver" All of the atoms that refused to enrich life are becoming distant as the swing sets that rust in a cracked bucket. With arms atrophied from the pull of a plastic sleep, I hug myself until silver can fill the fissures. "It will be alright," I whisper through lips that have seen war and sang about the beauty of tulips. My ribs waltz around a treasure chest but refuse to open it out of respect for what may happen next.
"Conviction of Hellfire" The mind is a slasher flick and the monster shares a face with the clock that was shattered when my theory of warmth became a conviction of hellfire. The horror runs towards the smog, the town, on bare feet and our breath both taste of a once kind moon now reduced to a corpse in search of life.
Sluggish Odyssey There's a coffin chained to my waist. I've been dragging it for eons and the indent it leaves behind me is able to laugh in indifference. I've come closer to the ground with each passing minute as soil replaces sweat. Will I ever acquire the strength to open my burden and see what's inside? I don't care right now; I wrap this chain around my head and rest on what I own right now.
Warm Pixel Remnants of a decades-gone summer flutter like dragonflies in a pattern resembling DNA. The hands waltz on a linoleum bed and the legs reach for the cracking drywall that once sheltered a warm pixel. We're always an invading force in someone else's daydream. The flesh and the heart are just vessels that house angels who are bored of Heaven and are too good for anywhere else.
Vivacious Celebration Depression is a dragon in need of perpetual slaying; you sharpen your blade against the slivers of light that sneak from your teeth and remember that life is not a tragedy nor a euphoria but the rift between the two, where every step is a vivacious celebration for the blood that frolics through you like an inner child through a school yard colored in ultraviolet.
Giggle Beyond the Screams You are not a work of art. You are an infinite amount of works of art, hung around the universe for existence to take in and admire. Shredded poetry flutters from your eyes into a crevasse of question marks and they beg to be read with a pat on the back instead of a remorseful blade. There is a giggle beyond the screams; one day, you will hear it and never listen to the moan of a dying clock the same way again.
Crawl from the Grip of a Frayed Bullet Casing There was an itch in which I immersed myself because the rest of existence seemed anesthetized; the sky became a city and the grey became blind. There's a time to crawl from the grip of a frayed bullet casing and my hands and knees are blissfully caked in the bacteria of a hospital hallway that stretches from right now until I shrug this bardo from my shoulders.
EVERYTHING YOU DESERVE We love you in the glint of your razor. Our bones revolve around an action that uncovers a new sun with its longing hand and we bend the movement into something resembling a parasol that betrays every law of the indifferent universe by blocking the boundless black in your grasp. I hope this love finds you every day, that it sprints from your chest and runs its light steps over your scars until finalizity becomes someone at which you barely wave in rare times.
BEYOND VICTIMHOOD You divorce yourself from a neutral reality only to bed a bag on inflamed guts. There's a razor nestled between your ribs and you use it as a think piece instead of a defensive implement as your hands begin to resemble the faces for which they once aimed. You're better than this. You label yourself a victim but you know you're a leviathan that is capable of smiling with the intent of brightening the depths, not out of spite but because it's the revolutionary thing to do.
BORN-AGAIN BUDDHIST I found myself feral once again, knocking at the back door of a house of vultures. There was blood in my mouth instead of foam and I swear it didn't taste like mine but the hand that would slap me without even a whisper. I had a waking dream in that moment of an epitaph that spelled my name wrong and there were kind words thrown at the severed appendages that brought me to that place. When the door opened, I almost pleaded with them to feast on what I had left but instead, I walked away with my head held in neutrality and the gait of a born-again Buddhist before spitting out the unknown on the sidewalk outside of my home.
Once dull aches that slithered around the ribs will become luminous canaries that perch on life's veins and chirp tunes to which even a vow of silence will break just to sing along. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
ELLIPSIS I rip my brain from a skull I no longer recognize and let the smog roll in through the cracks. With this ambivalent reality, I pound against the walls of the present until it bruises like the clock in my childhood bedroom. This solves nothing and I'm left with a barren third-eye and a lack of need for anything besides a hole in the world that fills with irrational numbers over corpses with no identity beyond disdain.
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEING BURIED ALIVE I've been sifting through ashes of old anxieties and loved ones, trying to find a point that could make me bleed instead of visualize extinction with every blink; I thought I found it in a fuschia crumb or a dancing atom but it always dissipated under the weight of my fingerprints so now I'm left holding this rotten air and we're both pocked with either desperation or nonchalance. It's getting more difficult to tell the difference especially when the ashes I tossed aside in my search start to pile onto me and all I can do to escape is shrug these careworn shoulders.
3:30 IN THE MORNING I awake at 3:30 in morning with pruritus of the soul, scratching while not knowing who I am or what I've been craving. It seems I've been pounding against the same chunk of drywall since I was in grade school though I've been flailing across the universe with my arms open to all that has passed me.
A CONTINUATION OF A POEM I NEVER STARTED Healing is selfish but selfishness isn't always a bad thing. I scrape dead skin from my fangs and write a continuation of a poem I never started but finished a million times before. Ink will fill the craters that pox my emotions and community will replace these serial killers that I perceive in place of the featherless doves that try to sing to me through the static of an obsolete radio. I've found a place on every planet but have felt like an alien on all of them yet there is a crack that runs through each one and in these fissures, I find a home instead of just a shelter.
OUR COMFORT WITH PERPETUAL NEGATIVITY We point at a hazy problem while being the largest puzzle piece of that problem. What were once passing emotions have become our personalities. We hold our fears and our hatreds closer than our own children while claiming we're making positive change. We can be better than this. If we don't put distance between ourselves and our electronic limbs, those appendages will sever us from us like rotten grapes plucked from the vine.
THE GENERATIONS THAT ABANDON THEMSELVES We've been gifting one another the same length of rope, wrapped in stomach acid that resembles gold flakes. There is a silence that we all share; we call it "healing" but it's a war that will leave us begging to be statistics instead of loved. Our generations abandon themselves in the limelight of phone screens while we wonder why we're so alone, surrounding ourselves with dear, intangible clay so we never have to communicate or deal with the discomfort of being human.
When we meet in purgatory that's flooded with the irritation of two eternities, will our hands entwine like serpents who have only known solitude or will we forget one another with our heads held high, wishing we could hang them in grief instead? (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
CUTS AND TIME We change our names a thousand times before we get out of bed. But have we, ourselves, changed? Our brains are splotched with cuts and time; we tend to the passing of imaginary concepts while our blood screams for shelter. We deserve better. The gutters may call our names with the nostalgia of peroxide and though we may be flattered, we must keep walking until the street becomes a gravel road, becomes dirt, becomes the primordial sea into which we kick our scabs with no closure. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
PERPETUAL CONCERT OF HEALING The lion shrinks into a kitten only to evolve back to the lion. A thousand roars and a million mews are ringing beyond the cul-de-sac in a perpetual concert of healing. There is power in our occasional emptiness, as if the purge that comes with growth floods a past screenshot of the world and lets a new universe bloom from the irrigation. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
JOURNEY TO THE PEACH TREE Is there another side to a conflicting emotion? It's a dichotomous journey in which you crawl among corpses of yourself to find life in the shade of a peach tree. You may feel cheated when the exhaustion and the ache seem to drape themselves over beige flags but, oh, how sweet will that peach taste as the juices drip from your dehydrated skin and the night tucks itself into a sunlight that looks just like you! (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
A flash of lightning caught in a glass jar will be a pet which we coddle until time and the spring sky merge into something beyond our lives. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
APATHY AS A DEFENSE MECHANISM I'm abandoning hope and pats on the back below the bridge from which I hang the future. I've developed apathy as a defense mechanism because it's healthier than wringing the world in my condemned hands. I am alienating myself from them, from me, as the dinner table where we all once sat next to each other's laughter and good will now burns, to be replaced with a graveyard where all tombstones read "why?"
WOEFUL SPITE I've been decapitated and my remains tossed in turbulent waters. Salt and stone fill my guts as my ego churns in woeful spite for the planet that my body has placed atop the mind. I'm frothing at the incompetence of the "helping" hands that expect legal tender for their invisibility while I destroy whatever hope has left in its wake. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
FILTHY FINGERNAILS I'm dissecting the boy I used to be with the filthy fingernails he left behind. I apologize to the child but he refuses to reciprocate. I owe us both everything so I grab a planet from memory and we both stare at the gift, debating on kicking the worthless thing or walking away with eyes heavy as uninvited rain. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
CHAINS AROUND THE WORLD So many times we throw ourselves into the wolves' den, expecting them to accept us instead of devouring what little we have left. There are no alphas when everyone is terrified of themselves. With bare hands, we dig into landfills of broken glass, trying to find what we never had, while a chorus of howling bounces in an echo chamber a million miles away and reinforces the chains around the world. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
SCHOOL YARD FOR GHOSTS We're turning the world into a school yard for ghosts. With noses held high, we play with toy replicas of ourselves and think we owe each other nothing as the sky closes in and we beg for shelter. When our wounds start to blend into our lifestyles, we become perplexed at the empty spaces to where our circles once extended. We expect perfection of everyone we meet while pardoning ourselves of war crimes. The silence we gift our loved ones is tougher than the jade we ignore when salt is closer and easier to pour into our wounds as we convince ourselves we're the victims.
I've been pounding my fists against the cement grain for so long that even my scabs have become empowered. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
COLORLESS DISCOURSE We've removed the color from this world with the loop of arrogance and our discourses with echoes. Utopia is wounded every time we crucify those who are human while we refuse to confront the mud puddles outside our homes. We cry "freedom and kindness" with matches and gasoline in our hands but the hypocrisy will turn us to ash long before we're able to suck life away. (Image made in Glitchlab and Canva)
POINTING MY FINGER AT A VAGUE INDENT You have one foot in high school and another in your grave. Which will bury you first? I've defended you in rooms that turned you away while you shivered in the monsoon but you've set the universe ablaze and now that room is all the remains. Everyone else is drinking to what never was while I'm sad for what could have been. You've spent your life writing manifestos in what you claimed was ink
We are constantly traumatized by the unhealed. Our duty walks home. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
FUN HOUSE I'm in a fun house, hammering nails into the ceiling, sticking photographs onto each imperfect protrusion. One day, I will step back and try my damndest to suppress my incensed stagnancy but today, I'm exploring the crooked laughs and the distorted struts until I find the clarity I crave. (Image made by me in Glitch Lab and Canva)
LOOPS OF INCOMPETENCE I'm sick of the bullshit, theirs and mine. Loops of incompetence leave me in a nightmare in which not even Kafka could find art. I'm chewing broken mirrors to wash the taste of life from my mouth. Survival is a Herculean feat that seems less worth it the more I breathe of our shared air so I tie my body to a streetlight and let it become a pendulum that counts down until an apocalypse finally saves me like my birth never could.
THE ONLY CONSTANT The patterns are needles and the thoughts are opioids which I devour to make the chaos seem organized. I crawl from the void only to fall back in over and over so why rise when gravity is the only constant? I take the failures of chemicals and coping skills and I kick them in an infinite loop, hoping I'll smile this day from the inverted catharsis but I end up weeping fire; I can only hope there is a Higgs field underfoot and it dresses itself in oily rags so I can finally understand what it means to create.
FUTILE CALLIGRAPHY I've been writing letters to you for decades without lifting a pen nor a finger. There are open wounds adorning my face like the funerals I never had the guts to attend and there are scabs on my knuckles that incriminate me for trying to move on. I am greedy for wanting you back when my very own skin closes around the sunrise. There is a photo of us that I keep in my spare room where we flex for the camera as we contort our smiles into a joke to which only we knew the punchline and I swear I'm still laughing decades later because I don't know what else to do on the days where your outline overshadows your presence.