standing ankle-deep in broken promises,
i feel their fevered jags
slit the palmed flesh between my toes,
shrieks of mirrored staccato hitting a
frozen ground like
acid echoes across
the rain-abandoned parking lot
inside my chest; lysed
screams silting down on
smeared lashes, leaving silver-ashed
edges at the bottom of my jaw,
eviscerated hopes sliding off
my tongue and into the scrap
at my feet, silent and unearthly.
dregs
i drank down
your lies like
a washed-up moonlighter
nursing her
last bottle of sweet wine:
a pinot with
a pretty label and
a bargain-store
price tag whose
finish burned ever
so slightly at the swallow and i
should have known
the morning afters
would more than make
up for the high.
second circle
someone once told me never
to turn my back on an ocean but
truth is the lies crashed
over my head before i
could suck in my breath;
now buffeted by deaf winds and
drowned in tumbled waves i
slide noose-like under
waters too heavy to hold me,
scrape shins and
veins against a
shore all too willing
to forget.
once upon a time
you were my muse
and i was your poet;
i saw the rhythms of your soul:
they raced with me across a beach,
laughing.
so when you tentatively
held out your fingers, i
took them as a lifeline,
shut my lids to the
wounds of this world,
found a brighter self in your
ocean-eyes. but like children we
swam too far out,
past the point where our toes
touched land, lost
our footing and ourselves and
somehow you found me facedown
on my kitchen floor,
sunk down in tears and pain,
not the girl you had
fallen in love with, not
even really
a girl at all.
in the darkness
you rubbed dry your eyes;
you shook yourself off;
you locked doors all around me,
blind to the reality that i
was already prisoner inside this
skin, and you, you walked out
under crying skies but
walked free nevertheless,
taking my heart with you,
leaving me to drown alone.
