I Told You I Was Lost So You Would Leave Me Alone and Then You Did

i. I’m stubborn in remembering you even flayed like this around my shoulder blades, and all those hissing scales tipping time over my wrists until the water around me runs red, streaking crimson unsurity through all the locks I thought I left rusted shut, all my fingers broken off in the ear-holes, and the whores begging for bread in the alley and the denial needles. I kept you all dolled up, draped in color under Christmas-tree lights with a gag through your teeth so you couldn’t drag my thoughts on the straight and narrow. You were pretty, up on your shelf, and I forgot while I held you tight how smell can sift like sand through my fingertips and how warmth is a relative emotion, when all you dream about is fire. ii. I knew the exact moment you fell, when the keys turned and the violins trembled and my eyes rolled back in my head while I writhed on your remains. You were soaking through the floorboards, that remnant of vanilla and leather, heady dreams of a past life when no one but you even bent to touch my side-scars. I scrambled on knees, like the prayers of the homeless, trying to lap you up before you drained through the cracks, my tongue weaving and sobbing when all those splinters opened it up like red petals in autumn, swimming forked to snow again. and all I could think was, god you taste bitter, until I realized I was bleeding through my eyes again. I could have washed your feet, instead I bleached you out of my carpet. iii. This is my sidewalk, I think, the one I should have found myself hog-tied, bone-white in the December sun by now. It’s the one I’m spilling myself out on, flat-on-my-back against the stars while they laugh because it’s a rape of sorts when they steal your faith and you’re supposed to feel warm, but I wanted fire so they sear me to the stomach with their remorseless lack of simplicity. I’m just waiting for you to come back and get me. My cheek is in the puddle forever and my name is mud while I lay still beneath this rain that’s washing sin off my hands but not my brain, once it starts refracting again. I’m not broken, and I’m not glass, but I can’t be liquid forever. I can’t melt off the sidewalk any longer. I should get up because walking is still solid, but it hurts too much to hear all the meaning in the echoes of where are you. *"That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight losing my religion, trying to keep up with you -and I don't know if I can do it." -R.E.M.*