its easier now with time to afford names to the neurosis that

i cast around you like piano wires, those that you simply laughed

off and those that edged into your flesh like pyracantha, strangling

the life from those people irresponsible enough to ask more than

my name. those that i held under the chill waters of my discontent,

bubbles rising like full stops from steel blue lips that gave out so much,

so futilely, as if spoon fed to a startled baby not yet used to the sensation

of anything but salty milk on the tongue. now while the rotting fruit and

furred crusts of stale bread lick at my ankles like a giant, decaying tide,

i see the truth in my lies, the parts of my brain raped and reviled by

youthful dark matter, apprentices baying for blood and semen in darkened

doorways lit by ever dimming nightlights and sound-tracked by midnight

whispers and between station white noise, voices growing ever silent before

succubae sat full weight on my asthmatic lungs and bit my chapped lips until

red blossomed from a pallid slit of a mouth. how easy to see those halcyon

days spent eroding my neurons and selling my soul to festering strobe lights

that stopped people dead in ecstasy for what they were, the scraping and

excavating of precious memories and cancerous nightmares, the sado-masochistic

flagellation of the only time in my life that i could call anything other than

alcohol a comfort. so let’s dance honey, lets slip on our glass slippers and hit

the town before either of us remember the children that lie upstairs, voices

ever fading. let’s dance and end up by the cool water, me holding you below

the restless surface, full stops rising, eyes fading fast as i foam from skin to marrow,

inhale deeply and spit out my churning tide.