Can You Taste Me?

My fingertips smell like stale cigarettes

And cigarettes smell like teenage boys

with candles burning in their hearts

I’m bathing in the thick North Carolina heat and I can feel it permeating my skin 

down to the sinew

down to the bone

into my blood stream

I’m melting 

You can see my colors pooling underneath my chair

Dripping through the wicker lattice

Staining the cheap plastic

The bugs are arriving

Beasts of the African plains

Seeking Nirvana by the watering hole

The flies dip their tiny feet into the gradually expanding pool

Rubbing 

Gold and Crimson

onto their grimy faces.

They drink their fill of me

And when they’ve had enough they are quick 

with their goodbyes

But when they try to fly

They find

They’ve become too heavy for their fragile wings

I’m oozing purple now

Royal to Lilac

My feet are a  brilliant shade of 

Lavender

One by one the flies begin to

still

Frantically buzzing wings

are silenced

Tiny feet caked with dark matter

are frozen

The poison in their bellies

has rotted their tiny hearts

I’m bleeding Blue now

every color of the ocean

The heat is gone

and the flies no longer come

The sickeningly sweet draw my colors once had

has turned acidic to the eye

I am alone

and my fingers still smell like stale cigarettes

And my breathe in the cold air reeks of nostalgia

But now I can feel 

a small flame in my chest.