Pet

Perhaps what frightens me most is not having done it well enough to feel complete before I’m erased from this mad place for good. Perhaps I overcompensate, cut off my nose just to spite my face. The way I write the words like tossing smooth rose petals one by velvet one into the void which only widens as the time rolls on. Words like sharp knives flick themselves in my chest, trail little fires along the blue veins in my wrist. The mountains we scale inside our old cavernous souls, searching ourselves for signs of a life worth living, a life that is ours and ours alone. The blood we spill, the tears we cry, the tears which refuse to come and instead bloom into addiction, hidden hauntings, long halls of vibrating thoughts on repeat, on repeat, on repeat. The lovers we take into our darkened caves. Kiss them, fill them, tease them, kill them, walk away. I’m not looking for a savior. I don’t need your plastic Jesus Christ. If what’s within me isn’t enough already then I’ve got nothing more to offer you. Take this skin, take these bones and carry them off into the setting sun as it swallows this wracked planet down whole. It was Bukowski, of course, who nailed it: Don’t try. In some obscure interview decades ago he said it, That’s very important: not to try, either for Cadillacs, creation or immortality. You wait, and if nothing happens, you wait some more. It’s like a bug high on the wall. You wait for it to come to you. When it gets close enough you reach out, slap out and kill it. Or if you like its looks, you make a pet out of it. How many have made a pet out of me. Fastened me with a slick leather leash and told me to crawl. Stroked my little animal head and led me straight into the pleasures of the moonlit gardens of hell.