i'll never be a poet

overcompensation

once a upon a time, a boy got his heart broken.

so he dunked his head in the toilet bowl and stayed there, resisting the adaptation of gills so his lungs could drown. he screamed churning bubbles in a raging froth about his ears so no one could spy the salty beads of tears among the boiling waves.

he emerged, holding his tongue in the back of his throat to sustain his choking and sputtering and to feel a lump in his throat other than the chunk of apple adam vomited into his genes. pearls of clear, sparkling water slid down the drooping spikes of his hair and descended, drops of dew in shimmering round enclosure. he wished his tear ducts would squeeze out the same result, but he was denied this release. so, mouth agape, he solemnly watched his hair cry slow tears into the toilet bowl, drop by drop by drop, his heart beating out of time with the plips into the bowl of water but somehow sore like an overexercised, overstretched calf, throbbing slowly in his silver ribcage machine.

he took his skateboard to the park and parked himself under a tree at 3am, cross-legged on an imaginary lotus bud, airpods plugged into his watery earholes. his pores were now bulging, the skin trying to hold in all the moisture he absorbed from his self-swirly. the water had swelled his brain by at least one and a half times its original size, evidenced by one squishy cranial balloon on his forehead. droplets secreted from the crevices of his sitting body- the inside of his closed knees, in between his toes, under the folds of his jaw, behind his ears. but try as he might, no water, not an invisible vapour of a droplet, left his eyes.

this goldfish mass on his head was so inviting for a fingerprick- oh, the satisfaction that would flood my aubergine heart-jar from one light flick at his temple, to feel the tsunami of water gush out of his swollen head and spit on my face. he had to protect his enlightenment, one hand cupped at his waterhead and one on his normal-sized heart.

- void of blood, that is