Black Gutters, Painted Ceilings
Between the black gutters and the painted ceilings,
Dogs teach dolls how to die.
Study the rot in my bicuspids, file down the calluses and watch the heartbeat
Shake the skin like strychnine shivers.
Whispers fill the space between the curtains, hanging from the scaffolds
Hushed against the legs, porcelain and fractured,
Broken down the middle.
Kintsugi can’t restore the signs of the break, and red mouths
Can’t look anything other than bitten once they have been.
Sing for me, redlight lover,
Sing the words that the angels won’t touch, and watch: hymns gather in our corners.
Conversations with the ceiling are painted mock-ups
Of what lives and crawls in blindspot gutters blackened.
The highways surrounding the heart, rushing with red ruin
Sanguine and torpid with low breaths between backseats and
Cocaine gloveboxes—
Will it steady your nerves to partake?
Move for me, bunny, and leech my loneliness; can’t you see it’s flooding out my neck?
Draw the door and punch the lights,
Bruise the knuckles on the deed and sigh,
Baying over the carcass, oh hound with its kill,
Trot between the cradle and the grave with canines dripping hunger’s ache.
Here’s where we go to die, doll, the both of us;
I will bite you open, and they will put me down, sheets to palls, buried side by side.
Wrench the cork from the bottle like the head from its neck and drink;
Raise a glass to the dolls,
To the dogs and to the dashboard lines,
To the desperation of black gutters and painted ceilings,
And to the highway blood that never finds its way home.
When the glass breaks, they’re going to teach us all how to die.
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