Scars for Callouses

She traded scars for callouses,
and silver stained fingertips,
rubber shaving bits sticking to her shirt,
she drew and wrote the pain away,
for all that it was worth,

I yearn to hear her short stories,
hidden in the bleeding lines of ink,
In my tears of sadness,
it is still silent as I weep,

The flowers of the fall,
died and drowned with rain of warm winter,
leaking in, turning ash to mud,
Molting metal corroding,
food for grass that is dying,

Flipping over the pages,
stained with camel smoke,
The tobacco lips take me there,
Liquid glass, intoxicating,
Melding the world together,
Into something bearable,

The bottle's cut me,
crimson, ironic, viscous,
globbing over lips in clumps,
drooling down my chin,
dripping on the pages of a diary,
rolling down my neck into my shirt,

Chasms breaking my skull,
Hollow ravines reverberating infinite darkness,
Echoing cacophonies of words she wrote,

"I've got scars,
and they hurt like hell,

It takes time to grow a garden,
and mine is in the underworld"