✭        ❝       it would be a shame if we allowed a few rotten apples to give a bad name to the whole barrel  .       ❞

        ❝       he thinks he’s going to live forever  .       ❞

                ❛  OH AREN’T YOU A HANDSOME LITTLE THING . ❜        mariah walks with a certain confidence , the surety of death in louboutins heels . she cradles her sharp face between arcylic tipped fingers . when she looks at men , she sees how much they could possibly be worth . IS IT WORTH HER TIME TO TRY AND GET PAST THESE BARRIERS ?  an inhale , clove smoke exhaled deeply between her teeth . maybe that’s what her mouth tastes like ; pretty red lips curved into a smile . but there is the slight hitch of her brow , she reads something familiar in the way that his neck his corded under his collar .         ❛   have we met before , habibi ? ❜

          ❪  ꘎ ♛ ━━━ @archaelogy​ touched the outlet .

cigarette smoke stretches     &&     twists like a ghostbird    he extradites from the perch of a parted mouth   ,     a writhing bloodless thing hazing before the laminate gold of his face     &&     dissipating in sunlight  –  the blushing fool bartering recognition of the red flower crawling on to his cheek for ersatz tuberculosis  .      a lone wing torn     &&     caught in his throat has taken     &&     double knotted his trachea in spite   ,     limned with a hyphae of razors so when he coughs against his sleeve each lodges deeper into their scaffolds  .

the wind howled  .      not a metaphor   ,     not a figure of speech  .      either the brute clambering against the old walls     &&     prying in from the windows has a distinctive voice or the voice rode piggyback on the brute while the edifice rattled all but where the ossature is cement grooved with spools of weather across the blighted culm surface  .       perspiration dripped     &&     sang from the mouthpiece roof of the great relic hybrid flute of his endeavor  .      each silver joint looked like steel in the iron blue night     &&     in each shadow squatted the motley faces of his paranoia with a growth putrescent polyps on their jaws     &&      bulging eyes entrenched in sockets limned by desiccated flesh cracked into ocotillos with bloodclot blossoms  .      chalked skeletons jostled to cinder     &&     agonized mouths adjacent with cavitied teeth  .      if there’s a hell then it’s not one of fire but eternal abandonment in the carapace of these anonymous fossils  .

softened echoes of tumbling chalices     &&     chinas down some entryway obscured by implacable darkness     &&     the clamour of expedited dissolution   ,     the sputtering of curious clay stele statues dissolving with neglect absolved in every which direction across the musty marble floors diffusing chips of gray     &&     cruor red  .      a brassed glove shielded the candle from the stowaway zephyrs pilfering the agonizing architecture ignominious with age   ,     squinting through the tenebrosity the flame cannot divide instead recoiling with some unfathomable apprehension called cowardice  .      this great melodrama of a man in the last chapter of his life     &&     another perpetually at the last page of his  .      though absconded from his face the many limbs of of the corridor’s vestiges     &&     the souls in tinmen bodies have long since pulled jonathan’s heart to drum on failure     &&     now the hampered dust landing on his arms take on insect legs     &&     skitter up to his neck   &&    into his shirt  .      he’s not fearless  .      he’s never been that  .

𝘉𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘵 .

when he woke in the walls of a foreign room    he’d found at his window night beyond implacable darkness  .      a set of candles to the right of him in front of the window stretched     &&     twisted with the reflection of the pierglass across the curtains     &&     both were unsettled     &&     shivering as if something had torn through the vermiculate pattern of the mesh screen  .      something jonathan couldn’t fathom or see  .      he’d made the fatal mistake of being oblivious to the mute calibers that reached in despair     &&     instead focused on the dream he’d woken from   ,     where ignited his house had swallowed him  .