you have snakes for hands
and if there’s a kiss after the last one
you will have ruined me.
promise to ruin me
shush i didn’t say that.
serpent life
serpent life
you grow moss on everything you like.
you need some coldness to place yourself into.
a kiss is just saliva,
sour and repeatable.
where does my madness come from?
why’s your mouth a hexed thing?
is to kiss to drink?
is a kiss a watered down bane
from under your tongue
fermenting while you chew
a thing of beauty waiting to belong
to be drunk as dark wine?
only it doesn’t truly wait.
so to kiss is to bruise.
i said a wrong thing,
i assumed the romantic.
you spit out blood and silence,
never wine.
so i get drunk merely on the airs around you,
a feather,
an angel,
a lightweight,
a crime. drunkenness. a dead bird impaled on an iron fence. a white wall. something ugly. something transient, breathe to forget me. pale green mist, a small black thing. bellyaches will go away with time. nothing. fake gods dressed in dusk. nothing. cold nights that smell of tongues chewed to blood. your fingers. my legs. scratches, casual sin to violent sin to doubt to blood to rot. rot is still desire. a small savage, a biting creature. pink lips mouthing my own death. and down my throat - a wet void, forest blackness; moths and behemoths wasting away. like grass grows bravely just to be stepped on. once upon a time i was a firefly and you held me in your hands. you’re not fazed now, you’ve been gutted again. shame, sweat, it’s spring, so it’s suicide. junkyard rats. stand in the rain, let it spit on your wounds, we’re at war with the sky. your legs. my lungs. divinity in a plastic cup. jaded wanting. there’s nowhere to go. don’t die, give me back my guts but keep the worms. nothing. something ugly. tired of hope. hope persists, she’s a cockroach and someday i’ll thank her. ants and screams and how unfair. the pillow’s where we die. blow out the candle. nothing. the best of me is just a hole. just how deep? it tingles still and i’m blue, how shallow it turned out to be. a fickle thing, a transient flicker, i bit my lip, i admit, a self-played piano medley on a cross-hatched fate. you hate words it seems, you speak in graphite. night wind and Hello you’s and ringing in my ears. i am the songs they play in the elevator to heaven. please mind the cloudscape. everything, a dream. something ugly, something no. it sings so it can’t be evil. simply starve this hunger out. i try. i try. my heart is covered in ulcers. a lump of regret in me so i can’t swallow your choices. i’ve started to swallow, defeat is not humiliating. it’s waste, it’s underwhelming. do as i say, the gods of sleep awaken for a few seconds every time you light a cig, it’s dark, there’s no hurt in the tree bark. hide in the tree. hide in the tree. i’ll follow. hide in the tree and go first, we know i don’t trust you. we know that i trust you. these violent delights... and so it goes. eve’s ladder, pictures of us, jinxed laughter. crack your knuckles in my mouth and i’ll decide if it’s medicine. hold you tight. your name in the bathroom mirror. my name on the bus window a steamy proof i existed. we have burned through time at the tips of each other’s fingers. if i’m an angel is that why you kill me so slowly. maybe the best of me is a deep hole after all, some tube to the core of earth where a door is waiting for me to go back home - to flame, to magma, to magic, to devotion, to devils worse than you but they are needy of my touch. you’re not. a shivering, far away, the tunnel, tram tracks, look back - is a tram coming? only looked once, then stared at you. we know that i trust you. farewell to flesh, but hope’s a cockroach. forgotten, don’t need this forgotten. healed, unbruised, spat out, outgrown, chewed, muddled, frozen, a memory. i need serpent moss and tape for the shards. morning light and dewdrop eyes and taste of metal spikes and we fell asleep, i left.
you have snakes for hands
and there was a kiss after the last one
and you have ruined me.
