cigarette smoke.

coffee mug

black plaster and white rimming, blue-blue eyes with pink flowers pupiled up and half-blooming in painted skulls. vines on a coldren of ink and shine on deaths forehead, spitting out fire and bleeding out tainted rain. drip-drip around your flowered eyes like some sort of embezzlement, or coffee dripping from your mug. cold-hot, iced tea and black milk. caffeine in your blood, just pick your poison, and it ought to be dark enough to rival the lavender under your eyes and the sunken hollows of your cheeks.

pull apart your lips and watch as your teeth peer out, one by two, three by nine, our noses all dip the same. hear the wrong way cartoon shaped. draw a garden in your jaw, it's where you'll be buried.

in―

your hands are crooked on the handle, no chips just yet. you watch your crooked fingers twitch. there are stains on the lip of that cup, on the white holder and the painting plastered on both sides. identical.

―out.