no light, no light

“Girl with a thermonuclear heart; heartbeat like a ticking clock, loneliness like a catalyst. Does your skin not crawl with fire? Does the restlessness of it all not buzz beneath? Are you lying, when you smile? Girl with teeth for a smile, with a mouth for a weapon always firing the wrong way. When was the last time it meant something? Do you still wish yourself away? Does it even matter?”

It’s true what the critics say: You can’t write about love until you have known it. Other emotions are felt by the heart: An automatic process, a quick reaction, like pupils dilating and unexpected outbursts of melancholic laughter. Love lives in experience It breathes in the short gasps of lovers Inhaled when spring comes and flowers bloom The exhale a longing sigh of teenage romance. Our fingers. Clawing. Craving. I hope one day they will intertwine.

Their hymns reverberate in your bones, but beware my lonesome man, because that’s all that’ll be left of you. Their beauty incarcerates your soul, their sweet promises beckoning you to come into the water, their seduction so sweet you don’t notice the taste of sea foam and metal on your tongue Don’t think she’ll spare your life, just because she loves you. Don’t think your soul isn’t hers to take. If you enter the water, you’re done for. You’ll end up in a watery grave.

Death comes to me again with a familiar smile and a divine longing. His sleek hands attempt to catch my soul, but I have always been smoke: vaporous and disappearing. Death comes to me again with forgiveness and something wretched this time.  He takes me into consideration and says “Is this what you are? Is this what you’ve become?

I kissed her until her lips bled unholy words

It begins with your laughter: a light, ecstatic feeling in my chest, an answer to a question I never asked, and me, a clock slowly falling behind, forever chasing the time it can never quite catch. Then comes the guilt when you speak my name. A thumb hovering over these text messages, that I never sent because they will hurt you, – but I’m hurting, too, when you blame me for the oxygen that I steal, for all these wounds that just won’t heal. Condemning the marks these nails left in my hand, but let’s not forget that you were the one that put them there. Preaching this toxicity of the heart like you’re the victim, while you’re burning me at the stakes. My bones taking forever to burn; My ashes forever caught in your lungs, beneath the lips that spoke these words, that taught me how to burn in the first place. It ends with the memory of someone I once knew. An imprint, forever on my heart. The dirt that’s never coming off.