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..."