Tell me what you want, what you really want —
I want peace, but peace is just a word
I use against the voices, blunt and blurred,
my family's hands around my future, gaunt
with their ambitions. What I want is reckless joy,
the kind that burns and leaves a guilty stain,
so good it must be bad, so bright it's pain —
I want to be intoxicated, then destroyed.
I want to be pain-free. But listing this,
I notice: every want's a negative space,
the shape of something absent, some abyss
I'm circling. Maybe wanting is the chase
itself — and what I want, beneath all this,
is just to want from an unhaunted place.