Friday, May 17, 2013

That Which Is Below



Cigarette smoke swirls up to a white washed ceiling as lights from passing cars create moving patterns of phantoms. Phantoms who laugh at us.
It’s 2:30 AM and you ask me why you’re so scared all the time. And I look at you and you remind me of an Indian headdress. You’re not scared, sweetheart. Your fears ride the wind but the feathers stay.
It’s 2:32 AM and you command I write about you. There is India ink on the nightstand and a safety pin on your pillowcase and I spend the next eight minutes marking you with the proximate vocabulary of how I want you.
It’s 2:40 AM and you can’t sleep. We’ve spent the last three hours crushing the sleeping pills into ash and we’ve blown it into soda bottles of strawberry cola but you say it still tastes of resigned escapism.
It’s 2:41 AM and time is a bag of bones that drags itself over cracked asphalt. It takes too long even though we’re not waiting for anything - but we’re the liars in room 618 because you’re waiting for the forest and I’m waiting for you to get out of it.
It’s 3:00 AM and I’m reading. You grab my hands and trace the folds in my fingers where the rhymes hide. I’ve been trying to put it on hold, telling you I’ve lost them.
It’s 3:17 and it’s just another night threatening to tear at the seams to reveal a morning I can’t will into being easier for you.
Neither of us have had much luck with relationships. For years he’s been on-again, off-again with the same shitbag, the same abusive scum. I would kill just to be “on” with anybody at all. Two lonely losers lost in a night of unrelenting sadness and paranoia. At least for now, we have each other…

1 comment:

LMB said...

Thank you.