You really know how to make a girl feel special, special like rotting fish or wilted flowers. You really know how to make a girl feel loved. Loved like the three-legged feral cat by the train track who you leave food when you remember. What you really know how to do, is how to make a girl feel deflated and downtrodden, like every last sweet fiber of my being has been extracted and all that’s left is the skeletal core, housing my dying organs. I’ve breathed, sweat, and excreted all the goodness I was born with, all for you. You’ve bled me empty. Now I lay a corpse of our love, baking in the flames of my own Hell. And where are you?
You won’t answer if I call, not even if I sing with full lungs “Where for art thou?” So I fill my body with other things now. A stomach full of liquor and lungs full of smoke. With poison warm like your love, loaded like the gun I wished for last night on the single star amidst the city lights. You said you hated me that night, I hate me too, what does that mean to you?
That I’m copping out, that I’m playing all the cards up my sleeve, that I’m braying like a dying animal for an unattainable union that’s disintegrating like acid-doused skin. The hardened layers peel away like unruly scaffolding, giving up their support without a care for the inevitable collapse. I crumble, a hollow body. My bones bend, my skin sags around the restructured frame, my self medication seeps from the flesh wounds.
If only I had the courage to walk across the train tracks, like the wild cats that scamper back and forth. But when I hear the whistle I will not run, I will lay with the rusty track tracing my spine and the wildflowers tickling my hands and feet. When the whistle blows I will not run, I’ll let the train slice me like a high speed butcher and spew whatever’s left inside in every direction. No need to gag and bound me, your lingering words hold me still.
