On hand and knees, she leans over,
cups her palm to your ear,
whispers,
You know what writers need?
Heartbreak;
Unrequited love;
Broken families.
Of feast and famine,
they breed on starvation.
Hungry words make for pure sustenance
of ugly creatures.

Pour them out,
until you are dust.
Every filament burnt out in your eyes,
but bursting with light in the depths of your ribcage,
illuminating a thoracic wasteland.
As your heart sputters,
the letters become bold like key strokes
on the typewriter you no longer use.

Your lust is amusing.
What play-thing have you discovered
to fit the heart-shaped grave that you dug
in precious moments of conviction.

From her hair you weave a crown,
dirt-stained and brittle,
a symbol, you say, of your love.
What a shallow bed you've carved.
It, too, will wash away with the rain.

Long nights await you,
and days that leave you heaving.
Parched,
your words will be like sawdust,
hewn from the spats of a sometimes lover,
that you just can't forget.

This grave site is a sorrow-making place
and you have nested here
(this place you call a home)
to grow old and rot,
beside the heavy idol
of her tomb.

I see through you like the glass
that you are made of.
Pick up your shovel;
You are not done here.

My thoughts return to you constantly,
unbidden and miserly.
Washed away like soap bubbles,
slipping down the drain.
I can forget you
if I just let you drip down my hands,
fall onto porcelain,
rinsed away by my dampened will
and thought alone.
The resounding echo of you
fades away with every passing moment.

But day-drunk,
(oh darling)
I miss you effortlessly.

Don't talk to me of your temperance.
Foolhardy, you leave me
an opaque reminder;
a stubborn ghost.

Don't tell me that you don't drink her in
when she crawls in to your bed,
this blinking, dewy creature.
Half-light seeps in through drawn curtains
and you can't breathe for a moment.

How intoxicated you are
that you can't find a breath
through all your carefully placed words.

I hope it feels like drowning.

Your whores
are the reason I wake
early morning fretful.
I am disguising charm
for appetite.
Your painted messages
nauseatingly perfumed
like you had bathed in the oils
of lust itself.
Forget to remember me,
the one of many,
thrust up under your teeth,
an annoyance you'll temper
until it festers.
Every moment I am blind
and searching
(knees wrapped in cellophane)
for a new way to hate
you;
in love.

Dear,
How deep and dark does this road go?
When you say you know love
do you mean it?

The shadow of you
at night
longer than it ever was,
obscures my sleep.
Heart hammering
Full stop.
Crashing into your depths
Drowning in the shallows.
Forgive me.

I want to tiptoe across your bones
Wade into your lungs
As you sigh
And speak to me
As if in tongues.

I wake up
distracted
unfolding pages
upon pages
of heart ache
like counting bones
on your rib cage
as you fall asleep
beside her.
I am awoken by demons
I cannot begin
to number.

She suffers in long silence
Winded by the obelisk that marks your grave.
Light breaks across her chest
And she screams her hate,
black and dripping,
it covers the solid ground where you lay,
Unaffected.