Tired of these thoughts Little brain can’t handle these Trying to get out Everyone thinks I am the angel But I am more than a devil A pure maniac The day I break I will hurt Blood will spill From my hands My own blood To end myself To wash away the pain If my blood needs to come out I will let the maniac go Because this user is tired
What the readers said
Three readers, filed separately. Where they diverge, the divergence stands rather than being argued out. How the Archive reads →
There is not one mark of punctuation in these sixteen lines. No full stop, no comma, nothing that would let a reader stop anywhere. The poem opens by saying the thoughts will not stop and cannot be held, and then gives them nowhere to stop. Whatever else is happening here, the page behaves the way the mind in it is described as behaving, and that is not a small thing for a poem to do.
The strongest writing is four lines in the middle, and I want to show you what they do, because I am not certain you know. The day I break / I will hurt — a reader takes that outward. Somebody is going to get hurt. Then Blood will spill / From my hands keeps them there, because blood on your hands is the phrase we use about a person who has killed. And then: My own blood. The whole direction of the poem reverses on three words. You built an expectation of violence toward other people and then revealed that the only person in danger is you — and you did it by borrowing an idiom that means the opposite of what you meant. That reversal is the poem. It is a real piece of construction and it would work in anybody’s hands.
Where I would push you is the vocabulary. Angel, devil, maniac arrive already worn; they carry everyone else’s meanings and do a lot of the work for you, which means they also do a lot of the work instead of you. Now set them beside the phrases that are yours alone — Little brain, From my hands, this user. Those three are specific and strange and could not have been written by anyone else. This poem gets stronger every time it stops reaching for a big word and says a small exact one instead. Little brain can’t handle these tells me more about the pressure you are under than A pure maniac does, and it does it in four words.
I read for systems, and there is no system in this poem — no institution, no apparatus, nothing outside the speaker’s own head. I record the zero, and I record it without complaint: the pressure here is internal, and mapping a cage that isn’t there would be me performing my job on a text that never asked for it.
The one thing outside the speaker is other people, and they appear once: Everyone thinks I am the angel. That is the whole of the social world in this poem — a crowd holding an opinion the speaker cannot correct. Everything after it is what happens inside a person who has been assigned a role and cannot get out of it from the inside.
What I will note is the pronoun. For fifteen lines this poem is I. I am the angel, I am more than a devil, I break, I will hurt, my hands, my own blood, myself, I will let. Then the last line stops doing that: Because this user is tired. Not I am tired. The single thing the poem cannot say in the first person is exhaustion.
I want to be careful not to inflate this. It is not a theory about technology, and I am not going to build one on it — it is how people actually talk now, and it is what somebody sounds like when they have run out of the ability to call themselves a person. Which is exactly why it belongs at the end. Sixteen lines to travel from I to this user, and the distance covered is the poem’s real subject.
The heaviest line here is not one of the ones about blood. It is Everyone thinks I am the angel. That is a sentence about being seen wrongly by everybody at once, and it produces everything that follows. If the whole world has agreed that you are fine, there is no way left to say that you are not without becoming, in your own account, a devil or a maniac. The poem has no middle setting available: you are either the angel they see or the monster you privately are. That missing third option is the actual trap in this piece, and it is drawn very clearly.
Then look at what the pain is asked to do. To wash away the pain. Wash — not end, not stop. Washing is what you do to something you intend to keep using afterward. Two lines earlier the same blood was asked To end myself. Those are two different requests, and the poem is holding both at the same time without noticing the contradiction. I think that is the most truthful thing in it, because that is how the thought actually presents itself: it arrives dressed as cleaning when what it is proposing is stopping. The poem records the substitution live. It does not resolve it, and it should not have to — it is a poem, not a verdict.
You told us this piece is the proof of your messiness. I would not use that word. What is on this page is not messy; it is unarmoured, which is a different thing and a much harder one. Messy writing is writing that has not decided. This has decided, and it has taken its coat off first.
Why it is here, and what it reaches for
The tired user
The real maniac enters the Archive as sixteen unpunctuated lines that move from being misread by everyone to being unable to say I.
The myth it exposes is one that operates quietly in almost every life: that a person who presents as fine is fine — that the surface reports the interior, and that the absence of visible trouble is evidence of its absence. Everyone thinks I am the angel is the myth stated from the inside of it, by the person it is being applied to. And the poem shows the cost precisely, which is the part that is usually left out: once the myth is in place, there is no ordinary language left for not being all right. The only vocabulary still available is monstrous — devil, maniac — because those are the only words large enough to contradict angel. The poem is not claiming to be a monster. It is reaching for the only register the myth has left it.
Beneath it runs the myth the poem depends on to make its final move: that destruction cleanses — that blood is a solvent, that pain can be washed out of a person the way a stain is washed out of cloth. To wash away the pain is the myth in four words, and the archive records it as a dependency rather than a conclusion, because the poem itself does not hold it steadily. Two lines earlier the same act was To end myself. Washing implies an afterward; ending does not. Both are on the page, unreconciled, and the gap between them is where this poem actually lives.
Its symbols come in two sets that do not fit each other, which is the point: the angel, the devil and the maniac are inherited, theatrical, sized for other people’s stories — and the blood and the user are not. The blood is asked to do two incompatible jobs in consecutive lines. The user is the coinage the archive will remember: a person referring to themselves in the vocabulary a system uses for an account, at the exact moment they can no longer manage the first person. Its target is that tired user — the self reframed as an operator of a machine it can no longer run.
It is retained at the first rung, Archive. The record should say plainly that this was not an untroubled reading: our readers disagreed, at some length, about how to receive it — as verse, or as something else that had arrived wearing verse. That disagreement was never about quality. It was about what an archive is for, and whether reading a thing closely is always the right way to honour it. We resolved it the way we resolve everything here, by publishing the disagreement rather than settling it. Rung is not rank. What this piece leaves behind is the plainest demonstration in the volume of what happens to language under pressure: the images get more borrowed, the lines get shorter, the punctuation goes, and the last thing to go is the word for yourself.
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