CHARIOTS, CARRY US

when i told you i loved the smell of gasoline, you didn't understand. you didn't understand how i could deeply inhale something so toxic, something that most people hold their breaths to avoid. you didn't understand why i leaned out the window to stare at the filmy rainbows swirling, spilled out on the concrete like the filthy fallen tears of some forsaken technicolor angel. when i tried to tell you this, you couldn't understand how i could find the beauty in something so noxious and destructive. then again, no one else could understand why i loved you.

sometimes the end of a friendship is like the death of a star– you don't realize that it's over until the star's already long gone. you look up one night and instead of seeing that familiar spark of light in the sky there's a blank void, because that hunk of dead rock stopped shining a long time ago and now you're the last to know.

s p i t f i r e, they called her. the truth was, she was anything but. she would never be a wolf of a girl, no matter how much they wanted her to be. her smiles were empty, her temper extinguished. she was nothing.

. . . no one ever suspected the boy with the singed fingertips and blazing eyes to ice over his own pain in secret.

he held you like a breath and you wondered how anyone so broken could still manage to find a well of untapped tenderness within themselves.

i stepped out of my shoes and into the night, all unwashed hair and nicotine-stained fingers. to the cars blasting past me, thudding with the bass of the top charting songs, i was invisible.

i am gauzy spilled oil rainbows & shattered hard candy on asphalt. i am your bitten tongue.