your fingers dressed in one of my cigarettes,
the river swallowed moon & vomited sun.
the price tag of smiling interrogations kept my nervousness
wearing civilian clothes, choking on barbed wire fence
with our bodies surging in the evil hot smell
of just a few more hours. we were the actors
& we were the stage, an artificial cage
of pumping blood in our shoes,
the orange eyeshadow on mountains,
the creased pages in a book of utter
unimportance. i stood naked in functional art,
transcending the voodoo doll of our twisted fusion.
scorpion stings lion. lion bites scorpion.
friday becomes saturday, listening
to the whispers in your vintage coat
with my knees still kissing
grass-stained denim.

i.distort#

he analyzed the blue & green under my translucent shell
as if he was a vampire in a dollhouse, feeding
on anemic figurines dressed head-to-toe in burning white.
i pulled his hair out because he pulled out mine & mastered
the art of ambivalent answers to acid-tasting
questions. we both reeked of cigarettes & cheap metaphors
with seemingly no ceiling of purity of bliss.
submerged in his saccharine self-indulgence, i watched as reality
& our starving warm veins danced their goodbyes

executed by ego, erupting to entertain or to grow.

ii.disintegrate#

hyenas screamed opportunistic dinner
as he pinned me to the tinfoil bed of our neurotic
disposition. the breakneck vagaries of hormones
gave birth to this organic chaos, this ill-fitting illness
of lip-synching his favorite lies. hearts
turned into unstable disco balls beating
to the promise of latent euphoria.
eyes became the color of madness. he grew a pine forest
around our stimulant masquerade
& paraded around with gold-plated shoulders, pretending
like the precursor hadn’t been him
but we walked purple & breathed white until

we were neither robots, nor other definite words.

iii.damage#

i began crushing glittery butterflies into salt & pepper
on the rooftop of a panic attack, tasting iron,
thinking yellow. he stood in silence
as i drew red spiders on my thighs & crashed my anxious circus
into a distant tetrahedron that looked nothing like a breast, no,
it wasn’t something he could grab.
i bathed my teeth in a lake of paranoia & everything

crumbled into pixels like names vomited on bathroom floors.

iv.deteriorate#

i wanted to paint entactogen escapism on canvas
but my dirty porcelain fingers broke under the weight
of silver ashtrays. he put me on display under the evergreens.
i embraced nature & the pine needles pierced
through my naivety — just relax, relax,
relapse. i forgot to feed the angels, electric ants morphed
into bruises & i started counting the endless stairways.

he told me to stop chasing the initial high. i said, make me.