If there’s one thing you can rely on me for,
it’s my ability
to start a fire
on these pages of this
nervous novel
written in a
perspective riddled
by climax.
Tumours feed on the
tissue of paragraphs
that formerly
filled
in cracks and holes,
tease plausibility’s tension in
making mindless attempts
to love
disbelief.
It’s a story no one sees when they
ask how you’ve been or how you’ve been
bent.
But there we are,
braindead on your bed again,
as I talk about the sail boats
I see in the ceiling,
feeling like
a family of
fireflies who
learn to fly
before they can
flicker
only to
become specks in an
avalanche that ends in
a whimper.
You continue smoking that
bowl until it is
ashes.
Come daybreak, we’ve given
syringes namesakes,
trading garter snakes for
pythonic
fists.
And it’s sick how we need this
death grip to feel most alive, a pipe
replacing
natural highs.
Ritalin binges
aside,
it might be the
drugs talking,
my conscience
mocking me
but when I’m
asleep I
love you more
than the
man who would
kill you in
a heartbeat for his fix.
You’ve branded letters
in my skin but my breathing
was all I could
respond with.
Fists and broken
plaster
masquerade as
kisses the
morning after, but
we both know disaster
always relapses.
It’s the axis around which
we revolve, our only
resolve to
escape the
ghosts of
our basement nation,
only to burn out and sleep
to a soundtrack of dreams and
wake again
in strange places.