#:hounding

Rats Over Concrete

I used to think you smelled warm. It's just stale now. Closed in. I'm trapped in the basement of your chest, and you won't breathe me out. I'm bound and gagged, weaved into your ribs. Wound around the wound where I slipped in after my blade. You barely bled. You're bored with me, you won't bleed for me, you won't bend me, still you won't break the boards barricading me in. Just in case you get sick of someone else, I suppose. You want begging? I'll beg.

I lean in to you and I sink to my knees and I pull you down with. You open me for yourself and keep me there, the way you like your options. Cold floor burns flayed flesh. Is this wide enough for you? I dig my fingers into your skull, as if your bone would give when you don't. I press your cheek into my face or my face into your cheek, whichever you prefer, whichever. Anything. Whatever. You breathe. I wish I could steal it. Even, in the way of not caring. Bouncing off your ear, my voice comes back more desperate than I wanted to betray, gasping, broken the way you like it. Me.

theres a thin line between x and y

and youre putting it on your wrists

and im tying it around my neck

(performing burlesque, going to the office, standing in the garage hands shaking hoping itll hold)

its a thin line shes painting on her face and that's keeping the rails together.

it's a thin line she traces with her fingertip on her windshield, it's a thin line she twirls as she bats others.

it's a thin line that he sinks through to the chopping board underneath, it's a thin line he cuts.

it's a thin line he dashes the T:s with and it's a thin line he holds the letters steady against and it's a thin line that says nothing left on a kitchen table, it's a thin letter full of thin lines of thin letters against thin lines that will never be more than another hollow carved next to his, that will never fill in the gaps in the walls of a rented house.

it's a thin line that grows taller and thinner, it's a thin line that wilts and becomes a thin circle. it's a thin line soaked with your blood and it's a thin line that gets thinner. it's a thin line that defeats water still and it's a thin line that he ties the tackle with before he topples his opponent. it's a thin line in a bad windsor.

i'm on your porch. sitting obedient, tail down. whining to let you know i don't care.

i wanna grip your face in my hands and yell that you're losing me, force you to pretend like its not on purpose, just one last time.

Do you even say it for a laugh anymore? Or just because you can. Because you didn't notice, but at some point, you just started liking the way it felt when i let you speak to me like that and you meant it.

I'm not your mutt.

i'm an arrow from the forest, spearhead mouth and forward eyes. i carry parasites and pests and death. i drop them at your door.

i flash something double from the treeline.

i'm a howl in the night.

your walls and windows leach heat, is all. you shouldn't feed it. you shouldn't crouch down, offering your hand just to see. if you want something tame, you get something tamed, because i won't step in the same snare twice, you hear me? and you're begging to be bitten like you haven't before.

this is everything i was afraid of. i'm living the dream. i'm living the dream, alone in a room that's not mine in a life that's far too mine, all alone in a hazardously lit parking lot, all alone and they say to assume they like you but i'm stuck with the wrong Close. this isn't shelf stable. it's always i'm not going anywhere until you realise you can afford new running shoes. it's always i wouldn't, until i'm sitting there reading a book of blackened matches.

assume people like you. i'm pressing myself into an airtight container and cramming it under my bed with the others.

i'll never be anything, but i'll be more than you. does it matter? ill cram this paper (proof that they own 3 years, all of my life) into my mouth for charon and that'll be it. cause when you die you'll live, and when i do i'm not coming back.

i used to wish i was lonelier. so i could do it properly. it doesn't help: it's harder to die alone.

sometimes i'm scared you still think about me. like your thoughts'll grow legs and come haunt me, like your neurons'll run over and climb into my mouth when i'm sleeping. i'm dirtied with it. you've carved yourself into my face. i can't look people in the eyes, they'll see it, the warnings you left for them. i can't get it off. nothing penetrates deep enough. will i ever be clean enough? will i ever be clean?

it's wrong, the weight of my body on itself, these organs i carry, the space they take up. i'll never be small enough, pure enough, i'll never be a blank canvas. i'll never be rid of me nor anyone else. i'm a picture album paying tribute to the worst traits of everyone i've ever wanted to see me.

i said, (confessed, really, in the dark,) i think you should know about me, that i'm hungry. i'm always yearning. when i get what i want, i get greedy, i need more.

you asked why that's so bad, why i can't let myself have it.

i told you. i said, because i cant consume the world. because people get hurt. because i don't need these things, i need something to long for. i didn't say: because i don't care if people get hurt, because im selfish, and because all that keeps me in line is a fading conscious. because i have flawed fundamentals. nothing, nobody's ever enough, and frankly, it's no wonder prolonged exposure to my core leaves people sick. i poison by proxy. i leave everything radioactive--and i do leave. i don't want to hurt you, i don't want to always have more of you, i don't want to let you become my tinder. i love you, that's the problem, you're my gasoline, i love you so much ill burn you all up. every single one.

i hunger: not human, but pyrogenous. it leaves every victory and loss in equally sized and burnt piles of smoking ash; incorrigibly, resolutely, permanently pyrrhic. I am endless voracity, bottomless consumption, never ever sated. I am unquellable.

gamine, famine

im in the dark, looking in through a rain stained glass window pressing itself against the façade of an apartment building; into it. bleeding light onto endless dressings of october night. the evening feels too warm, i'm pressing my forehead against cold marble and arms against rain-wet asphalt like it'll soothe the burn. the sky washes the blood away, the streets carry it home. somewhere, i wish you were waiting.

the mornings are slow and cold, always waking up to stubborn rain. it's cleansing, i can breathe. it kills me. i'm not vast enough, internally, to hold the world, but i want to so badly. i feel it, when i spend the evening hanging halfway out of my window. it's selfish. i want to eat the sky. i want to feel the night in my lungs. i'm so hungry, and i cant hold anything down, i can't tame the stillness raging through me, it's got nowhere to spill and i want to clear myself of anything and everything that weighs me down, that limits me, that tells me where i end and begin. my body doesn't hold me. my body doesn't hold me.

i'm waiting for snow. i'm waiting to be red-hot drips melting crisp white down. it's not soft, nobody tells you this, the crystals burn your skin, on a good day the world will be trapped under a grating ice crust. i wonder if the rapids freeze over. if people die under the ice. if i ask nicely...

my skin aches for something to bite. im told im stubborn. im not, i'm insatiable. i burn, i hunger, i starve, i rake my claws against anything that might soothe this burn. i'm sorry this isn't what you signed up for. half the time i envy everything that's on fire and the other i set myself.

im in the dark, looking over a glassy black ocean and scraping numbed fingers through coarse sand. the wind and the hunger are the same. tearing. salt soothes excoriated skin, the pain feels real in a way i don't. i wish i understood the voracity. I'm not angry, i'm not in pain; i desiderate. who is that? who is it that longs for destruction, that thrashes and itches at peace?

whose hands is it, that beg so badly to destroy, to be destroyed.

i wish i could feel your skin, i wish i could feel mine. my palms don't wrap around my throat the way yours do. they don't cradle my jaw the way you do. i remember them. i can never keep yours in my mind. i wish you'd hold me down. i wish you'd have me gently. i wish i were less untouchable, less conflagrant. i want to feel your bones against mine. your smoke burning my lungs. i want you to press into my skin until i or it can't take it, whoever folds first, i want to feel you solid, i want to feel you like i feel cold glass and colder metal. soothe my fever, quench this essurient entity, quell it. one can't live with boiling blood.

i wish it cooled pleasant. it freezes me. your hands, anyones', ive been all used up and it goes too far, freezes me solid. i'm sorry i disappear when i'm with you. i'm sorry i move in extremes. i'm sorry this isn't what you signed up for.

i would rather not buy a puzzle at all, than solve it and have to look at the gaping wound in the picture where a piece should lay. than have to look at the table below, harsh contrast. black hole. the other pieces fall in.

id rather press with my full weight against a spike mat, than a single nail.

i will never get to experience the right childhood, all the formative events. i was a gentle boy, when the others playing football i was learning to knit, when they were playing pokemon cards i was helping in the kitchen. there's something missing, in a lack of scars from foolhardy adventures, of bones broken by reckless ambition, of bruised knuckles and black eyes, in being a gentle boy that learned to be a rough girl.

i fear that opening the pandoras' box will hurt more than wondering what's in it. a life spent in this dark room, clawing at the light leaking through the doorframe gaps, what could it possibly give to unlock it, to shed light on the chamber at my back?

i fear that my hunger cannot be sated, and in this, bread will only deepen my nausea.

i fear that it will all be beautiful and ripped away from my dulled claws.

is it not just easier to close my eyes when i walk by a puzzlebox, a nail jar, a door, a still lake?

can you blame me, wouldn't you do the same?

the safety of familiarity, of the known, is such a luxury; to throw it away would be ungrateful.