more monroe than onassis.

i feel better about my life
my messy excuse
when the rats’ nests that everybody else 
have kept buried under their stairs
come falling
hemorraging
rotting into the streets
instead of being kept hostage behind
scrubbed walls
and the clean faces
of all the liars i live with.

drinking sour wine
stinging the papercuts all over the roof of my mouth
spreading some kind of warmth
at the bottom of my lungs
my guts
it’s the first time since the eleventh
that i’ve felt anything inside of me.

love,
our hearts were painted
black.
it never mattered,
that tiny beaten thing
we’d drag around behind us.
we never needed
never wanted
for anything but each other.
sometimes i wonder
if i loved her enough
but i sit back
and think of
my life without her in it
and know that i did,
i loved her as much
as i could ever love
anyone.

im dragging my feet through mud, through all her liquor soaked words and his best intentions. my body is resisting, leaning back through years and miles. when they lay her body to rest, i wonder if my heart will be sent with her too.

my mouth is full of fingernails and limescale. the weight of this is buried somewhere inbetween my skull and my eyelashes. losing her is like losing blood, like i’ve taken every sharp tooth from the jaw of some predator and ran them into my guts. i can’t face this, im faceless, effaced and losing heart. im scared to pay a penny for my thoughts, so violent and blank they can’t even take shape. a dying animal has laid itself across my chest, crying for it’s mother and lost love. every time i open my mouth it is only the song of the wounded that escapes. she was my whole heart. and that’s the truth, the trick in it. i can’t point my knife at anyone but me. this story winds on, speaking of slaughter houses and hours, lifetimes of loss. it pokes fun at my thick tongue and pokes holes in me. she should have outlived us all. she was like flint. like a canyon and a mountain top all at once. beating and living and betraying fate. i should be able to say more than this, my whole life has been wasted in words. but instead i just collect skeletons of animals that have died on a highway, and hope that their death can explain hers.

regret regret regret.