Love Is a Sticky Mess

My tongue is leaden with
particles of you,
and my soul weary;
I love you
but I love you
no more.

I am more

ghost

than solid flesh. I

roam the piceous concourse of

your murky mind too long,

too often.
And I saw

Your shriveled bones.

I love you

but I'm suffocating. 

You crowd my lips 

and you clot

in the pores of my 

withering skin. 

You disgust me,

but I love you

and I love you still. 

When Love Dies

"It's a stillborn," the doctor says, mopping his forehead with a spotted kerchief. "I'm sorry." And he genuinely does seem so.

We would not look at each other. Instead, we fixed our eyes at the mass of bloody flesh in my hands, in our hands. I am looking at it with all my remaining energy, as if I could electric-shock it into living and pulsing again, as if we did not feel the wet coldness seeping through our fingers. It is stiff already, our dead love, rotting and decaying away in our hands until it finally disintegrates. Now it is just my hand in his, the drying blood the sole indication that we had any love between us at all.

At night we sleep together one last time, his knees fitting in the back of mine and his chest cushioning my back. We are both trembling and sobbing quietly, because we know, know with absolute and uncanny certainty that a single escaped cry would break us down and tear us apart. My hair is soaked with his tears.

It is no use trying again. How many loves have we revived only to lose them in the end? How many times have I felt the doctor's shiny scalpel slit through the thin skin of my chest, and through the scarred muscles of my heart - reaching deep into the center of it, only to remove my gasping love, deformed and grotesque, as it is? How many times have he dug the graves to bury our loves?

No more.

No more.

Darkness Owns Me

You'll never see the darkness in my mind: the bone-crushing blackness, the maddening loneliness, the infinite and cosmic abyss where I fall through an eternity. I fall and fall and fall and there is no telling how long it might take me to reach the ground, to be shattered into a thousand pieces, to end it once and for all.

You'll never understand how the darkness would suffocate me. It washes over me like waves, gentle at first, so soft I wouldn't even notice it's there; then it gets rougher, and I would get swept into the black ocean. I would try to swim, but the waters are viscous and heavy and the inky droplets would stick to my arms and weigh me down. The worst part is realizing that while the drowning at sea part is only in my head, the suffocating part is real. I'm doubling over and kneeling on the floor to breathe but it is like a thick layer of oil is coating my alveoli - my lungs just don't work anymore.

That's not to say that I'm depressed all the time. Sometimes it's as if I'm another person altogether. I guess that's what bipolarity does to you. But even when it strikes, I could fight it for awhile; when I'm with company. I could still pretend that I am another person, untouched by the darkness and I would fake it so well that even my demons are deceived. It is only when I'm alone again, that they would come back and haunt me and tell me that the brief happiness I had felt when I was another person was a lie, an illusion, and I was foolish to believe it.

But it's better that you can't see the darkness. Because then you wouldn't fathom the atrocity of my deepest thoughts. You wouldn't know that when I say I hate the world, I meant I would burn them all, all the occupants on earth - you and him and them and me. You wouldn't know that I dream of monsters, tearing and mutilating people with their fangs and their claws, only to realize that I am the monsters. All of them. Like zombie clones of me.

You don't believe me, do you? That's alright. I terrify myself too.

He Said, She Said

You said you like my dress, because it's so long and so red and it goes on forever. It's an amaranthine river that flows from the blades of my shoulders to the ground. The scarlet train pools around my feet like blood. Or ketchup.

You said you like my skin. Milky white and luminescent behind the crimson silk. Touch it then, I whisper. Trace it with your finger but be gentle, and soft. My skin is so thin it will break at the slightest pressure, and the red would come out of me, and I will die. Trust me, darling, I'll die. 

And I said, tell me more. What else do you love about me? I'm hungry and greedy and I want so much more out of you. So spill. 

So you said:  I love how you get all these crazy stories in your head and demand that I listen to all of them. I love the muscle on your thigh that occasionally twitches when you sleep.I love the warmth of your body, and I drink it every night, and it burns as it goes down my throat. Like brandy. I love your sing-song voice, lilting and fluctuating with every syllable of your words. I love our little arguments and how they always end with you in my arms. I love how you carry your pillow around and bury your head in it and sniff it and tell me that it smells like me. Or I smell like it. I love your insanity and paranoia and obsessiveness and do-you-really-want-me-to-continue-because-it-can-really-take-the-whole-night. 

Well then, I replied, you can write it all down and draw little random hearts on the paper, or you can shut up and kiss me.