You grabbed my face, cocked it to the side, and tilted it so that your words would slither into my ear and penetrate my limbic system. A heavy tongue, sour and acidic, filled with venom and thick with saliva. Poisoned, intoxicated – I was alive. You wanted more.

You whispered to me that our connection was unrivaled. You breathed that our love was unmatched. Our energy, our intensity, our spirits – you claimed they knew no bounds. Unsurpassable. These sentences clung together like a double helix and took form as the shape of a brittle heart. The heart, tattered and fraying, crashed on to the earth, only to be pulled by a stormy breeze and then lost in the vast and colossal oceans of the universe. We watched as the sky swallowed these broken sentences. The clouds turned their backs and concealed the opening from which the sentences were devoured. Not enough, you craved more.

We laid our bodies on a rock and observed the ferns unfurling in the sunshine. All the tiny faces in the trees surveilled our intimacy. I felt our auras blend into each other and create a deep vermillion color that turned to a liquid, trickled down our flesh, and then on to the stone beneath us. I rounded the palms of my hands to scoop and carry the color. I painted with the crisp aegean of your irises. I blended the vermillion and the blue. A palette unparalleled and nearly psychedelic until fused. I glanced at you with a pinching sensation in my body and a nagging in my soul. The varnish coalesced to a shade of black unseen and undocumented. Muddied with the dying auras and ladling the last bits, I fed them to you. Devoid, you regurgitated. Depleted, you retched. Empty, you never wanted to be full.

Pleasantly lost. Something new. The ropey trenches of your fingerprints have me walking in circles. These miniscule loops bring joyful tears. I am careful not to dampen you with my saline. I wipe most away, but you nod to me. A guarantee from you that I can leave a few as a trail to get me home. Please do not let me drown myself in my own pleasure. You are kind as you allow me to traipse.

It is soft here. It is delicate. I may have wandered here before without recollection. The warmth radiating from your fatigued hands. Please do not enclose them while I drift. The tiny bit of clamminess from your unreasonable happiness – a moisture so sweet, I can hardly prevent myself from giving it my tongue. My legs are buckling from your pulse. My thighs are dewy. My mouth is dry. Dizzy and dumb with distraction, I let myself lie here. Please let me stay here forever.

You are disgruntled and testy. I was not to sleep here. I was not to stay. Your hands lift to your mouth. Each finger is licked clean and polished. I cling and lament as you taste me. My aroma was not to your liking. You quickly cup your hands and place them on the floor – a path for me. A signal to leave. A trick. 

Before I depart from your fingertips, you decide that it is not enough and all too much at once. You clap your hands and laugh as you smother me. My body is flattened. The blood and organs and bones only as small as a pin prick. You clean that off in a rusty sink without a single iota of remorse, only a smirk on your face and a smugness wafting from your being.

I felt my entire being shudder and then a myriad of calmness. Entering a new season enables every thread to reset – to reawaken, rouse. I peeled the wintered, decaying body tissues off of every limb and as they fell, my existence became unblurred and luminous. The cigarettes in the ashtray were resting – calmly shriveling, soaking up the white sun. The begonias were inhaling the pleasant warmth. They fanned their petals and averted their gaze. I wanted to clasp this sensation and bottle it for you, but the moment had passed and the excitement had slipped through my fingers.

The blight enters the lips, hits the tongue, smacks the teeth and makes its way through the esophageal tunnel – at last quelled and lulled to a somber, sepulchral slumber. The light slips in and it is blue and achy. Blue and sad. Blue and pure. Blue to white to a deep crimson. Little poly-chromatic patterns and shapes in the eyelids.

Your eyes are the color of a dimming autumn sun, coppery with a soft gaze. The freckles around your upper lids and lower eye are little stepping stones or a miniature, clustered galaxy on the skin or a connect-the-dots game for my pleasure. Your lips are parted and inviting and you have freckles on those too and they are for my pleasure. The freckles on the upper lip are waiting to meet with the lower lip and both are impatient for my kiss. Hungry eyes and greedy lips and all for my pleasure.

My pleasure. It’s my pleasure. I stand here astounded and nearly choked on the mere sight of you. Asphyxiated by your gentle beauty… I wonder if you even know.

His gray flesh used to resemble the soft shade of almond, the pigment of his cheeks was a rosy hue which complemented the pallid saturation of his dim irises. Quite pleasing to the eye, his beauty could not be summed up and tossed around casually. He was merely the pinnacle of pulchritude, not only for his alluring appearance but also for his compassionate actions towards any single being or creature. As I gaze out of my window and peer into the abyss, I allow my pupils to dilate, enabling my focus to fade and become foggy. My mind wanders ceaselessly as I tap my foot lightly to a contingent rhythm. I remembered seeing the others. They almost appeared to be diminutive replicas of him.  Their faces were worn out and expressionless—emotionless rather. Flecked with a combination of dirt and grime, streaked passageways that carried thick tears, their faces were sullen—guilt ridden. Their body tissue was threadbare, almost incandescent as well as translucent. I could see their blood cells rising and falling—a routine that captivated my attention for a long while. Their lungs struggled relentlessly to persist, their organs slowly shutting down one after another. Their capillaries and veins would bend with every harsh movement they were expected to proceed with. In their minds, I could almost sense their biological clocks expiring. The time seemed to lack minutes, even seconds. I wanted to save all of them, but I remained helpless. I wanted so badly to salvage him, but I was incompetent. All of my insides ached to compress him into that of a tiny seashell, cup my hands, and carry him out of this malignant dominion.

For the love of my life—

Glassy-eyed, I drove. Everything was stagnant. Everything was static. Everything was molding and melting—deteriorating – falling from my needy grasp and hungry heart. I drove. I tucked my past in a small chasm beneath my feet and stomped the earth on top of it to make sure it was secure. The air was bitter that night. The flakes of snow were melting on the warm streetlights and the sidewalks glistened – this simple image hugged my body with an unfamiliar comfort; a comfort that drew my tepid, lifeless body towards you. I did not know you but I enveloped a tiny morsel of trust in the palm of my hand and took it with me. I inhaled deeply. I drove to you.

So bizarre lately. So odd. So unusual. And all things have a foggy, dreamlike haze that looms. It comes. It ceases. Breathing is hard and does not seem to happen automatically. I notice that I am aware of it and sometimes I try to mimic someone else’s breathing patterns. I find myself panting. Your rhythm is not mine. Your design, your composition, your delineation is not mine. I know. Autonomic functions do not feel so self-regulating. My epidermis, your epiglottis. I follow you into the brine but it feels like smaze. I follow you into the effluvium but it feels like saline. I’m baffled. I’m oriented. I’m evened, benumbed, and humble.

Resting in the hollows of his throat,
vibrating words traveling upward –
quicker and more deliberate,
climbing expeditiously out of his alluring lips,
being deeply entrenched into the folds of my cerebral cortex.

A perpetual static.
A mildewing, suppurating apple.
Crisp perfection with a poisonous outer shell.
Sweetness enclosed in a silky red veneer.

Ripe with anticipation,
I want to decorticate the waxy epicarp.
I want to discover what is inside.
I want this time to be different.

I am bombarded by what I already know.
I am trampled by lines I have already heard.
This scene has already been witnessed.

A deeply impressed indentation of a body on my mattress,
the warmth still resonate from the sheets.
His words still linger and hover with the air molecules.
His lines are a refurbished rendition of the previous entity.
They make every day seem stagnant,
and every one of my former and future lovers seem dull.

Crawling through a narrow tunnel to escape,
but reality extends its inviting eyelashes outward and flirts with me –
beckoning for me to become one of its conformists,
enticing me to ride the plain train;
to replace my individuality for something common.

These sheep are not just followers, they are far more atrocious.
Peel back the synthetic flesh, and they are robots.
Their internal machines tick like false hearts.
Frightened, I want to glue the ripped tissues back into place
Merely to diminish the bloodcurdling actualization I have witnessed.
They feed me a concoction of fallacious speeches.

Once contaminated by their sonnets,
I probe for an escape to cleanse my ulcerating thoughts;
A place to rejuvenate and allay all of my musing.
I come across a cave and make my way inside.

I bump directly into Robert Smith.
He had been hiding here all along.
The lines in his face crack with age,
and his make-up glides down those trenches.

His benign smile revealed the truth I had been seeking –
That every day is not simply a reincarnation of itself,
And there is a large abundance of individuality.
He sings various lines of A Strange Day
over and over until my eardrums pop.

beguiled inside a tiny box — tightly entwined with a vast abundance of shredded lace and silver filigree. i swathe this delicately around a coagulated, obsolete limb. tiny snowflakes dwindle further and further down until they are well acquainted with the warmth of your tissues. they melt with ease on your ailing, ethereal flesh. my brittle hands,composed of permafrost and porous diamonds, are capable of holding these minuscule molecules up to the phosphorescent light so that we can become familiar with all of their diverse chasms and divergent eyelets. curious, we trudge deeper into an abyss so powerful that the zeal engulfs our mere existence. “i am not a real being and reality is not an annexation.” your lips purse after this and i languidly contract and wrinkle into a mere icy minim; a modicum that you fortuitously inhale with sudden ease and dismal regret. “where have you gone?” i hear this while i evanesce in your throat. swallowed, i travel into your stomach. pregnant with surmise and conjecture, i meekly wait to be reborn.