rock candy

The cobwebs are pulling his mouth down,
sand has settled in his cheekbones, speckled
his face, a fractured mirror surrounded by

the memory of youth. Hot summer sidewalks.
Skinned knees. Ice cream cones. Sticky rock candy
now transformed to whiskey and cocaine.

Everything burns him like guitar strings
snapping against calloused fingers, iron
lowered into the flames of premature age.

Pretty lies dusting his murky charisma,
cigarette smoke and ashes curl and veer
through his dripping hair and down my back,

sparking on my spine, ripping me up.
Everything is numb and everything kills
him, but nothing can put him in the soil

faster than the bass line tearing him apart,
screaming his name until the world is dead,
torn open by the drugs that kill him.

via *

injection

I missed him the way you miss Novocain after the dentist; I didn't miss how numb I felt, how odd my own tongue felt in my mouth. I didn't miss anticipating when the numbness would end. But I did miss the lack of pain. The ability to chew my cheeks to ribbons without feeling a thing.

There were days where nothing made sense but to lie in bed and let the power of him drown me, covering my head and running down my throat. It was in those chokingly silent moments that I'd feel his hands around my neck and around my chest, pressing the air out of me until I thought I was nothing more than an empty bag of bones waiting for this Frankenstein of a man to spark me with seeming life again.

But that love was a lie, a masquerade I created for myself out of whimsical girlish fantasies and vinegar lies that dripped from his incisors. The blades at the ends of his fingertips cut one time too deep and suddenly the numbness left and I snapped awake. People will tell you that being numb is better than feeling too much. But why would you choose a prison of paralysis when the kingdom of consciousness is trying to welcome you home?

via *