broken skin i am left adrift into your whirlpool

ruptured sinews laying on your altar

a lighter in your grasp as you

light fire to etch lies in my rotting tissue

pleasing a god we never believed in

the plans i made to reap your love and

replant it in our garden erode

like the colors in my eyes as i

watch you set me ablaze into wasteland and

a world you painted melts down the church drain

“were we merely a tangible expression

of some ever so evanescent overnight rush?”

our dynamic was fabricated out of reality overdose

out of knowing we would end up devouring each other

like lunatics waltzing on flames in satan’s asylum

in somewhere i find myself running across the lands with blood and tears of the world spilled from shattered bottles chasing behind my heels. when i was young my mother told me everyone has a bottle in their chest. she told me to shield it well until she broke hers too. i hug myself close but my arms are numb,

screaming to the sky and i feel my lungs--a traitor to my head--pleading to give into the starving waves of people’s carelessness. i don’t know how gods will see me from above. while my vocal cords rupture again and again, my voice is still no more than a needle drop at a party. to the skies we are ants, mercilessly stepped on in a game of “whoever kills the most wins”. a while ago i found shelter in the ocean thinking i would be in the protection of purity but she then sent my feet back on the soil to proceed a marathon that never ends and told me to never return. it wasn’t because she didn’t love me, she just didn’t want the foreign waves to come dye her crimson. she told me i would have nowhere to go as much as i wanted to. in reality i don’t have anywhere to hide on land either. my legs tremble as i go. i wear shoes made of scars. the shadow of the waves--now twenty feet high--lurk right behind my back, the cold “waters” gently touching the tip of my skin as if reassuring me that everything will be okay.