You should know that one day I was better off

You should know that one day I was better off—
I cut myself with a blade, a knife, or even my own tongue;
I cut myself all over,
From my hands and arms down to the tips of my toes—
I looked like a scored Polish sausage on a grill.
But the demons inside me didn’t leave—oh, no!
They seemed grateful that I’d opened windows for them,
Letting them gaze far into the distance,
To see where they might secretly plant their temptations in the world.
And it wasn’t any better.
Instead, I discovered that
There are depressions that cut deeper than any knife—
You haven’t found that out yet,
Though you have plenty of opinions,
And even more judgments;
Yet you haven’t the faintest clue
That I have already died a hundred times,
That I haven’t even finished living through
My first hundred lives—
And it was never any better in any of those other lives.
I shot myself in the head, in the mouth,
Right through my most well-behaved words;
I died within verbs where life was only just beginning,
I unraveled into syllables or into the wind—
And it wasn’t any better;
There is no relief, not even in falling apart.
What a disappointment! What a cruel mockery, this nothingness!
I’ve snorted things, shot them into my veins, or swallowed them as articles of faith,
I’ve sipped champagne from the navel of a wild, possessed girl,
In the mornings, I’d feast on the ground-up dust of petty gods, or perhaps on crickets—
And now, I can’t tell what’s singing beneath my temples:
Is it the crickets, or is it Frank Sinatra? But I know that, this time too, things are no better.
You should know that, once upon a time, I was actually a genius—
And that was when everyone cast me aside.
Bruised and alone—yes, bruised and alone—I awoke;
They didn’t even dare to write a name
Upon my forehead or on a piece of wood.
I dragged another universe behind me, along with
An umbilical cord made of flayed realities;
And woven into it—like a spider’s web—were Time and I,
An aborted thing, crammed into a sac and cast away.
Even divine mercy
Could not be a mother to me, nor find me one.
Bruised and alone, I drifted toward an edge of my own being—
Bruised and alone, at the edge of my own world;
At the other end, there was nothing to be found.
And things were no better that way, either.
I looked outward—yet there was no window, no door—
But I peered from within myself as if through a keyhole.
I believed everything I thought—I believed it all;
I even believed things I wasn’t capable of thinking,
I believed whatever was said—
Back then, I believed anything.
And when I looked outward, I saw what I always see within myself;
But what I saw, I never managed to fathom—
Words do not always help,
And I don’t know—
Honestly, I don’t know if things are any better;
In this light, it suddenly grows cold.