Your hands have turned to catacombs
& you don’t know when exactly but sometime last month the last of your violets wilted in the hollows of your collarbones.
You’ve got spiderwebs for eyelashes the pupils of a black widow
and when they ask you if you’re okay, you explain you haven’t eaten much today

you smile with brittle-boned teeth.
Your heart feels unsteady in the way that it just won’t stop beating.
You dizzy in busy places & detach yourself from the masses
They keep telling you that this, too, shall all pass us;

like tidal waves and hurricanes at night;
like egg shells stepped on so many times they’ve turned to powder.
Broken bones that never completely healed
like a brigade of suicide bombers demanding that you kneel

But FUCK,
can’t they hear you screaming in your sleep?
You’re six feet deep in your salt soaked oceans,
sinking quickly and it all feels like serenity.

Didn’t they tell you breathing in the sea feels like
setting your heaving lungs on fire?
You’re all howling mouth and no sound, fading quickly
and it all feels like a funeral pyre.

It all feels like ashes, it all feels like dust,
It all feels like it’s exactly what you signed up for.