sometimes you haunt me
when I am drunk with too little sleep –
lost again in heaven somewhere on earth.
those nights are vexed with flashes
of crashing teeth,
tangy, cigarette-polluted breath,
and the thrum of your bluebird veins as you swallowed colorful narcotics by fistfuls.
again and again,
I binge your memory, purge
vibrations of your voice
blowing holes through my brain like
suicide attempts.
a paralysis seizes my throat
as reality creeps around me
in prickling thorns and
my nostrils wrinkle with the
unmistakable stench of your
expired desire.
it is 2:47 a.m. and I am completely alone –
swaddled in my own unrequited adoration,
shivering in frost-bitten rejection.
a slow, sluggish suffocation without your hands gripping my neck.
and still the slope of someone’s back might bewitch you to boil
rising like bile inside me.
split-tongued, venomous –
an entity digging sharp nails
into my spinal fluid.
memories of your gentle fingers come up like roller-coaster vomit.
I collapse under cracked bone in your
tensed jaw.
horned lizards
infest and ravage the clockwork of my skull,
passing a yellow fever through
infected kisses.
can you blame me for being so
ghoulishly infatuated?
your swampy eyes must roll in
peaceful sleep
while I inhale wood chips,
exhale cotton swabs and
dried spiderwebs.
I am wide awake – numb,
dreaming of Robitussin
until pink-cresting daybreak.
every morning since you
my hair has been disheveled from
birds of longing
and not from your hands
anymore