Thank You for the Venom

She doesn't speak of it,

Except in ink,

Once she would have whispered it in blood,

But that's been taken from her, too,

So strange,

The way one can scream their sorrows

and fears into a cavern...

Even stranger how the cavern screams them

back, makes you remember,

She remembers,

His memory is like a corpse,

Dead, decayed hands gripping her,

salt-white against the black smudges

on her soul he left behind,

At night, while she sleeps,

he spins her hair around his

spindle fingers...

Sinks them past her temple-bones

& carves tiny holes into the twisted

grey beneath,

Sanity leaked from behind her eyes,

Blood pooling in her ears,

Even in death he haunts her,

Who would have thought that

abuse could be delivered to the great beyond?

Some nights she thinks of when

he came up behind her, wrapped

his skeleton arms around her and

seeped poison from his pores

into her veins,

Some happy version of surreality

that electrocuted her from the inside

out,

Left her burning alive for days like that

til she burned out in the dirt, left

smoking like the butt of an old cigarette,

He would always take his teeth then

and scrape away at the charred

remains of her flesh,

Tearing away at her chest meat

until the smooth, stark ribcage

was exposed and beneath it...

her beating heart, ripe and

flush with hope(s),

Carefully he laid her upon the

table of his solipsism & smiled

at her that beautifully grotesque

smile - as he plunged a fork into

it's delicate surface, sliced

clean through it & placed it on

his tongue,

She never screamed as he ate what

was left of the good in her,

The only thing she had left

of herself to love,

Just closed her eyes and made

a great exodus into her mind,

& when she came to,

Blood spattered and sprayed

the walls, the floor, the room...

She smiled to herself...

It was finally over...

The organ that had caused such

malicious grievance in her life

was gone & the ghost pains

were all that would ever be left,

Being dead wasn't all that bad...

Once he returned to find

a note, written in red ink:

"Thank you for the venom..."

                                  

Maybe

& maybe,
Maybe if I can smile some more,
Glimmery, calcium-white rocks in my mouth,
That crack one another in haste and
anger when I speak,
Lips curved, spear-heading into my cheeks,
Any tighter and my face will rip in half,
Maybe...

& maybe,
Maybe if I can starve some more,
Get down to my happy 500 a day,
Puke and exercise the rest away,
All of my unnecessary flaws
melting before my eyes,
Dripping onto the treadmill,
Any more of me lost & I will crumble to dust,
Maybe...

But perhaps if I could crack open my rib bones,
Hooked behind them, a little girl, crying,
Perpetually crying in the dark,
Perhaps if I could rip her out by the hair,
Fling her off and away - hitting the wall,
Until she splatters like bugs on a windshield,
Washed away by the rain,
Maybe...


Maybe then I could forget,
Forget your fucking face,
Forget your goddamn eyes,
Forget your motherfucking smile,
Forget the fuck why
I ever fucking loved you,
I ever believed the shit you said,
I ever bought the dream hook, line and sinker,
When you sold it to me
sparkling like every diamond that we ever touched
beneath the lamp-heated glass that never was bought
signaling to me your lying tongue and betraying lips

Maybe - Maybe - Maybe
Just fucking maybe...

What Happens in the Dark

She sits, sometimes, in the carnival
glass dome of her skull, dreaming
of home,
Sits, wondering, not wandering, for she is not
lost, where the paint-by-number
line of fissure between reality and
surreality sits, between this and that,
here and there....everywhere and no where...
But as hard as she searches, valiantly searches,
it is not something she has come to find
as of yet,
Perhaps, when the artist painted her,
some lines bled and ran down the canvas
of who she should have been,
Could have been, had they not all
smudged and smeared together,
Maybe...

The mirror sucks her in, you know,
Voice booming like some unknown god
in the atmosphere, lip-licking, haughty sonofabitch,
swirling debauchery into her veins through
the tiniest hypodermic needle he could find,
he screams

She stares, Alice looking down the rabbit hole,
yet again,
She stares, hours and hours lost to
the unwanted presence of things upon her flesh and
beneath it that must be, MUST be, expunged,
a hair here, wrinkle forming there, cellulite...
Oh God, not that!

& Ana, the beautiful one, points out
each bit, standing behind her always,
here, here, there too, don't forget this...
She makes mental note of it all,

When they vanish, she slips to
the stark white cube, her own Pandora's
box, inside, the horrors and cure-all's
to life, death and whatever may come beyond,

One small bottle, nameless, faceless,
tiny, compact, spherical, magical,
She pops the top, attached to the crud-crusted rim,
yellowed over time, and pours magical pixie dust
filled pills into her bony palms,

Breaks each one, leaving them to
spray heavenly white powder on her
tabletop mirror,
One line, two line, three line, four...
Rolled up piece of paper in hand,
Clear the sinuses, up it goes, bend over
and breathe...
Inhale each bit until it hits the carnival glass
and shatters it...
Finally, finally she can't hear them,
see them, nothing...
Just sleep... that's all she ever wanted in the first
fucking place, wasn't it? Just to fucking sleep...
Not this, none of this...but there isn't a thing
she can ever do about it now...

Except sleep...

My Mia

She lingers in my shadow,

My shadow, too large, too

ominous, too much,

That's me...

Entirely too much,

Too intense, too solipsistic,

needy, empty, hollow, shallow,

dark, strange, too much...

There is always too much of me...

But she dances in my shadow,

Limber arms and toothpick legs

flailing and spinning, swirling

like a mad, whirling dirvish,

she cackles like thunder in the

dark, she illuminates life,

makes me see...

Oh do I see...

The excess, the fat, the cellulite,

stretch marks, jiggly parts, the

places on my frame that should bend

inwards towards my spine

and not outwards towards the universe,

no, never outward...

I see them, try hard to starve them away,

make her proud, make her quiet, at least

while I sleep...she never lets me sleep...

One pill, two pill, three pill, four,

Wine, tequila, vodka, floor...

I wake up to amphetamines,

Go to sleep to benzodiazepines,

Phentermine, Ambien, Klonopin...

Cocaine, if I could...I would try it...once...

She never stays quiet, not for very long,

and even when she sits in the foyer of my

brain, silent for a moment, while I munch

pieces of chocolate or slurp alfredo,

she tssssk's at me like the ticking of an

old grandfather clock, soon, I know, she

is going to chime when the hands meet, pointing upwards...

Some things, you will never escape..she's one of them...



Babble

& I look into your face, your

eyes, bearing down into my soul,

mouth moving,

I cannot hear you,

you're all the same,

every single one of you,

You babble, babble, babble 

recounting every moment of your life,

every breath you've taken,

every tear you've cried,

Until you sound like a blur

of words, syllables, noises,

I'm sorry, what did you say?

I must have zoned out again...

You bore me to tears,

telling me the same thing

as you did yesterday,

same story,

same wound,

same outcome,

Then you babble about how

much you love me, always will,

we know each other "so well"...right?

Wrong...you can't stop talking

about yourself long enough to find me

in the maze of your life,

In the maze of myself...

You don't know my

favorite color, favorite song,

favorite food, most hated attribute,

about men, women, life, love,

do you even know my name?

Do you know who I am?

Do you see me?

Do you really know that I am here?

In front of you?

Behind you?

Next to you?

On top of you?

Do you realize that I exist?

....No.....You never will.....

Drugged up Rantings...

I stare at it from across the bedsheets,
They are crumpled from your haste exodus
from the bed of my life (our life)
...I smooth them over. Think feebly to myself,
that if I can smooth them enough, no one
will ever know you were here.

That your emotional fingerprint wont smudge my
existence too badly.
I know that's a lie.
You left your mark.

On my eye where you planted your fist
and my mouth that you chewed raw,
dry and caked with your crusted saliva
that slopped off of your tongue like it was
a wet toad.

You left it on my heart that broke into pieces
and shattered the ice of my wrist that bled,
like war wounds into the wash basin...

You left your mark, you son of a bitch...

I stare at it, still.
Remembering the times you twirled me around in public,
screaming to the universe that you adored me,
that I was the only thing you would ever love,
and I remember smiling. Not the fake "church smile" or
"funeral smile" or "I'm F.I.N.E." smile...but a real one.
One that slipped onto my face with such ease I thought
it was just a dream. It could never be real.
I wish, now, that it had been just a dream.
I wish you were nothing more than too much to drink one night...

I sit - stupefied in my chair, pills kicking in,
mind checking out. I sit.

Waiting for them to say that on that summery
afternoon, a mere inches from jumping into life with you,
that I didn't find what I always prayed I wouldn't.
Not that...please? Anything but that...
Don't make me be the failure-esque, insufficient one again... please...

I waited for your call. For you to swing open
the door with sunflowers in hand, smiling that smile,
the way you used to be...and take me away.
Not to somewhere fantastical - just to somewhere
where we could be forever.

Now - tonight - I sit staring...

Six months - six months to the date and
I find myself swallowing the barrell of a gun.
The pills have numbed me to the core. I feel nothing except
the desire for it all to be over.

I pull - - - & see your smile...

It isn't real...I know I'm dying...

But then again, it was never real
and this is as close as I have ever been
to being lost in paradise...

My heart is broken...

Sad

Your lips mouthed words, no louder than a gentle hush,

That floated on crisp, October air, the way a leaf falls to

chilled earth,

Signaling it's grotesquely beautiful demise...

I only wish I had known that your words would be the end of me....

You smiled - the most beautiful, lovely, precious smile I had ever seen,

Enrapt with the twirl of your wrist, the sparkle in your eyes, the scent of you,

I always loved falling in love, but, when you hit stone rock below,

You wonder why you didn't at least take a peek on the way down,

October saw our confluence,

November - I was so sick you couldn't leave my side,

I remember thinking that I would pay you back for your kindness,

I paid a heaftier price than I should have...

December - we smiled for cameras, snogged beneath mistletoe, made batches of warm, gooey baked things that stuck to your teeth and melted in your mouth, and...

January - it got colder and colder still...

February - you spent the night with me on my birthday at the home of my best friend,

only to turn around, and let me wander aimlessly the next day on yours

...You thanked me for not coming with you...and as those words floated as softly on the air as your "hello"...my heart shattered into a million tiny pieces.

March - March was horrid. The death threats, the wishing of my demise, telling me I was a big fat bitch, telling me I was nothing without you...that my family preferred you, that my beloved Kristie preferred you...

I almost believed you...almost...

April - Was the worst...

May- we bought an apartment in the hopes that we could start fresh. You swore you loved me. Really - you just finally realized how badly you had jaded me, I think.

June - there she was. Nothing like me, nothing like you. She made no sense. THIS made no sense. Why her? Why of all people - HER? She "made you feel loved" and you were "over me" and...

....and my heart broke....

I haven't remembered much since then.

The sound of my soul crashing into the dirt.

The tangy metallic scent of blood on the air.

The moment I realized that I would never see your smile again.

We would never be....anything...again....

Why?