Way Ahead of You

Who will save you and by that I mean who will entertain you as your cursed ship sinks down into the bottom of the sea. Show me everything about yourself that gnaws at you, turn it all inside out so that the blood is fresh and the skin is crawling, corrupted, sweetly acrid for the vultures. And they are out there, baby, vultures, vultures everywhere. You write about the snakes, you taste the venom in your mouth and spit it down onto the page, how hard you get off when everything falls so beautifully, so desperately apart. At least it’s genuine, at least you can draw a perfect straight line between good and bad, telling everyone you meet how kind they are for watching as you cry beneath a teardrop moon looming larger than this life which seems to swallow you whole at every turn. Never say never and never say die but the thing is, I have died so many times it’s hard to keep count when the lights are this bright and the things they say, and the things they don’t say but you can hear the way they cut into your bones anyway, all add up to nothing in the end. Did you think I was sent along just to please you? Little bit of a god complex, have you, darling? Figure I was silently fervently grateful for those thin slivers of your affection? Think I didn’t see it coming, don’t know your kind? Did you think within me beats one single solitary buttercream heart? Not even close. I carry a thousand hearts within a thousand hearts, each pulse a new sensation both familiar and unfamiliar, and I am contained within them all. Try to remember this. Try. We don’t want love we want self-inflicted mutual distraction and the more I say it the smaller we become. The trick is not to need the screaming in the fibers of the nerves to stop. The secret is to not wait until the words are there to write them down. It’s hard sometimes to see things clearly when you’re looking up at the sun from so deep below the surface of the water. The view gets blurry and your sense of depth perception is thrown off. The body gets heavy and it’s awfully tough to breathe. But I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. The sky today is blue as ice, the most menacing and cold I have ever seen it.