the coastline is a temptress but i’m no martyr;

can’t you see the collateral damage inflicted upon

my bruising bones and bleeding wounds?

 

i’m a casualty in a war between the devil and god,

caught helplessly in the brutal crossfire.

 

i swallowed the moon the other night,

i swallowed it whole before it could swallow me first.

the stars were humming along to childhood hymns,

the night sky fell silent with unwelcome nostalgia.

 

how cursed am i to have such a heavy heart

weighed down with relics of the past

like stones skipped across a childhood pond.

 

it’s the cyanide in mycoffee

that kisses me awake in the morning

before it kills me from the inside out.

it’s the morbid fascination with

peeling back my dry and dying skin

until i begin to bleed again.

 

a hand reaches out to me, you try and coax me away to safety.

you attempt to trace the line of a spine that has

been missing in action for quite some time.

you try to pull me out of my own misery, but

i’m far too infatuated to part with it.

sadness has become a crucial part of my existence.

 

six feet deep in a grave that had been dug

fourteen years prior, lies what’s left of me;

rotting flesh and a still-beating porcelain heart

with one too many cracks to it’s name.

a battered shell that cases a soul worthy of restoration.

 

i’m sorry that i left creases in your skin

as if it were nothing but paper, but the curvature

of your spine is like the binding of my favorite

Vonnegut novel, and i can not stop reading.

 

do you feel the fire you’ve inflicted with

your matchstick fingertips amongst my bones

constructed of weak kindling?

 

there is a certain beauty inscribed along

the undiscovered catacombs of my heart and

it’s a shame they remain untouched.