The Mattress Still Has Your Body On It And I'm Not Sure Why

You Never Water The Flowers And Now They're All Dead

My resolve was stuffed with misfortune at its seams. Her body wringing itself out in excruciating ecstasy, murderous rapture devouring her terror whole and spitting it back out again over her sick, crumbling skin.

I rang the number.

The men in white glowed like parasites. They drooled and stumbled at problems they solved and the thrill of the red and the sirens. Their tongues long like flags, licking the floors and the scalp of her hair.
They took her apart limb from limb and carried her away to the place where light scorched itself onto skulls, branding resisting flesh into compliance. The holocaust of the sick, nailed to the cross and presented on the altar.

She's boiling in a room, the drugs pouring from her system and out through her pores, licking her sweat for the hope of a rush. Hooking her to machines, purging her veins until only thin oxygen runs through them.
She'll come back empty, her eyes vivid and lucid with death swirling around her iris.

I had prepared myself to watch her demise, her death and her heaven and her hell and her cruel purgatory but it was all a lie because now she sits in rooms with doctors and drips and lights that never turn off and I realize it isn't what I wanted all this time.

Laughing and crying and yelling all felt empty when the shadow of her shallow weight on the mattress left, I'm pathetically empty. Her phone calls are short and angry and I can feel her hate through the cell towers, the sizzling of the power lines.

I spend my days with cheap women and stolen rum and I don't remember it smelling so awful all the times I've lived like this before. Blurry dark that rests in between her chest, the taste reaching my throat and whispering outwards into my eardrums anecdotes of widows and flying bugs and broken wings.

I wrap my brown coat around my shoulders and a patterned scarf over my neck. It's autumn, and I can feel the first snowfall drawing near, the rats and the spiders withering away in ice blocks sculpted like pretty women with leaking eyes and handsome men with anger resting in their belt buckles. The rubber of my boots, thin gloves, little rips, torn steps.

Gravestones that breathe. They stare down at the corpses and laugh at them so genuinely it tears the spine from my back and ties it to a collar around my neck. The bones, feeble skeletons that hate their neighbors for the flowers on their soil and the love nestled into the pollen, and I can hear it, knives digging through the dirt and chasing and always missing.

I play with the letters I find glued to graves with foul saliva, I pretend they were written for me. I pretend they were written for me over sobs and bloody throats by people torn apart like ripped paper and I sleep in the dream of being broken down for.

Gulping down flesh and tissue, my first drink in years. Severing the umbilical cords of the holy and of the sick, welding myself to the vice.
It's lucid and liquid, warping around my fingers, holding so tight, my fingers turn blue and explode in grey asbestos that grow into weeds that never die even when the gardeners spray them with the chemicals that kill the blood from fingers and wrap too tight around my waist.

I curl in the dirt drenched with resentment, tainted by the tears of mothers and daughters and sons and fathers. I see it, the way they try to scrub it, turn the soil upside down, hide the grief inside out and laugh as if it wasn't there, but it's there and it's so loud and it smells so horrible there's no way to run. I run in eyes poking around glass bottles and straws and bitter sugar but sometimes I stop and visit the graves and remind myself of all the things I run from and it makes me run faster.

I go home dirty. The rooms are full of carbon dioxide and I die on the floor in a haze of cold showers that boil your skin into little fragments of snow.

Her in a dress. She would wear these dresses before, these dainty, innocent dresses and I can remember the shape of her back and her collarbones when my eyes would wander through her chest and into her body, into little holes and lies and truths stuffed into her thighs. She's grown now, grown ugly, grown sick and mean and tired and rehabilitated and every dress she wears is vulgar, her chest ugly and whorish and disgusting and grey and gangly, her innocence thrown in the vents, blown away. I miss her bones piercing my skin and my blood under her fingernails. Harsh hisses of pain, sharp and strong but short and leaving all too quickly.

The shadows eyelashes cast onto pupils, noses touching, brushing. Wetness that comes into them when I think about how she was when she was younger and how she looks in dresses and how things were before they were like this.
I cry for a very long time. Choking and punching the mattresses and sweating into myself and killing things that aren't there. I'm so very tired, so, I sleep.

I sleep for months. And I sleep for more.

And then she comes knocking at the door. She's calm, cleaner.

When I answer, her head is down and her brown hair masks her face and her tired, tired eyes. She's wearing a shirt and her arms are out, flesh littered with dots and scars and shadows of needles that medicate the ache in her muscles and the health in her womb.

I walk down the street with squinted eyes, looking for the little brown house with the weeds and the dandelions and overgrown grass sprouting from every inch of the ground. I notice it from a couple houses away, it sticks out so pathetically obvious amongst the well kept, sober houses lined up around hers. I barely notice the other homes or the trees or the people because suddenly, her house is shining a bright gold, screaming and whispering her name with violent, windy fervor. When I climb the steps, I steady my finger at the bell. I can hear shouting from the inside, my heart beating, pumping blood at its limit, bursting. I ring the bell and I can hear the sound pierce the air inside, ripping into the shouts and the yells and it spreads a terrifying, lonely silence through the long hallways and grim walls.

She answers. Her eyes are ugly. Her pupils steam with pain and anger and something else that's so blurry and far I can't reach it before it sinks back into her skin and fades somewhere into her mind. There's a slight smile on her bloodied face and she collapses into me like I'm everything, like I'm the world and the gravity and the sun and the moon and a good father and a breathing mother. Her sickness, her pain, I drink it in, enjoy it, savour it, because when she's like this I'm all she has and I'm all her bones and all her muscles and the only thing she can grab at and look at and feel. I can hold her tight and suck at her skin, I can hurt her and kiss her, her empty soul and her empty eyes will watch in their hollow little ways and stay still and say nothing.

The hammer is strong, extending every ounce of my falsified fury into his skull.

(Depend on me, depend on me.)

I don't feel much when I hear the crack. Her father was furious and violent, his bottles and his pacifiers and his cradles and his cries. With every drip of blood onto the yellowed out walls, she leans on me more, crying, crying, crying, choking, leaning, loving, (loving?)

(Depend on me, depend on me. More, more.)

Sizzling into myself, venom leaking from my pores and drenching his flesh, dissolving his awful mind and thin eyelids into the floor.

Her father was gone. We planned the funeral and visited his grave sometimes, for some type of sick laugh or Stockholm reminiscence. We're killers, and that's alright, her eyes are kind and the world is brutal and all the wars we fight in are solved on the floor of her living room with blood seeping under the door frames.

Drugs, drugs, we forget and we forget and we remember all at once. Noses burning from the inside, veins popping from our skin and killing our tissue, infection, bathroom stalls and grimy toilet seats.

I watch her spiral and only when she looks at me does she feel something that doesn't tear at her love or her heart or her soul or her bones.

I revel in her spiral, so much so, I don't realize I'm falling into it myself.