I love signing up for the substance free hall and getting a roommate that's a recovering alcoholic and a coke addict!

Yay for trying to escape my mother's drunken past and being caged in in with yet ANOTHER strain of feminine chaos!

...And they all wonder why my best friends are men.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Hey baby face, play a game with me. 

Just like in the school yard where you’d scrape your knee,

scribble in chalk that would later become

an integral part of your dysfunction because

you breathed it in, sucked it on (the) down(fall)

like the juice boxes surreptitiously filled with

water that

never gets you

clean. How refreshing.

Hello, princess, guess what I spy

in your stumbles and your slurs and the words in my mind –

oh my, oh my, why is this life dressed up like

Déjà vu.

Remember when you were young you’d play

copy cat? Let’s play right now. I’ll wage a bet:

for every hit that you take, I’ll be taking one too,

because isn’t that the way a mirror works, backwards and forwards, two and two?

Now, here’s me and you, but

you’re in the glass.

Making love to razorblades is a forbidden lust that – oh,

they never told you the truth? – doesn’t last.

It’s alright, Miss Mighty On High,

I’ll watch with a smile as you bleed your romance dry –

I’m still playing by the rules

by bleeding in black

and blue

ink.

You thought it would bother me not to be clean?

Well think how I th(ink) again, my friend.

I’ve been here before with a thousand different pens

and you’re nothing but a fresh old shade of red

with a tint of popped veins like the prickly cranberry stems

snaking around the bridge of your nose.

Here, give me one to hold –

I’m starving

and the forbidden fruit you’re forever in season to grow 

just looks so

bitter

sweet.

 

Baby face, play a game with me.

Just like in the parking lot where you tore your naivety at the seams

and stitched the dangling, remaining capillaries to your cheeks –

to your eyes. And to I.

To I.

 

Every time you pick up a shard of yourself

I hope you see your reflection and cry.

I’ll tell you to (be yourself!) suck it up

when you’re finally sick of making love to lust,

when you’ve finally (really, you swear!) have had enough,

scraping an S.O.S. with your chalk like –

oh my, oh my, why is this life dressed up like

Déjà vu –

 

What’s that? You left a note?

Oh, a juice box just splashed everywhere,

broke. Sorry.

Guess you’ll be left alone

with your chalk

and your (un)watered, dehydrated soul

because I hate the way you play.

And this game?

It’s really getting old.

(But you wouldn't know. Because you never did grow

up.)

...Here's more for you. I've decided to make a short story out of that little tidbit I recently posted, so here's the next piece to it; it's a flashback. I also edited the start (only slightly) but if you just read it, it won't hurt to skip over it.
Feedback appreciated?
[Disclaimer: I know it won't make much sense now, but in the grand scheme of things, it will all work; I already have it planned out. When I finish, perhaps I'll share it.]

He’s dribbling down her throat like a PineSol tap.

So covertly, sensually, he slipped lemon wedges into those finite creases of her lips so that she tastes him even when he’s off cracking open different seeds, so that he grows in her, eternally.

(“I’ve never heard of a tree dying naturally; have you?”)

Whenever she speaks, every memory of his acidic tongue runs over the inside of her cheeks, burning open wounds. He socks her with dangling whispers of pulp. Every bruise he inflicts pulses wine and blue, spray painting her lungs with a poignantly undeniable truth –

“You are alive.”

When she breathes the peels of skin he devoured from her mouth bluster out of her like strands of glossy rose ribbon – he unwrapped her. She never knew how bad, how good tulle and tape could ache until she felt them tear off of her with such a burn they stole pores and hairs on their way out.

“I want you,” he sears, and he takes her, and his teeth are splinters stabbing into her gums. Every second he stakes his roots into her soft, malleable hollows another iron curtain deep within her comes undone. Before she can even speak she is naked dirt - Mother Earth - torn up, raked raw, chewed up as cud for him, spit out.

“How do I taste?” she flusters, bleeding citrus, oozing sap.

He grins as he widens his wolf nostrils and inhales her life force, stealing the dregs of her anythings. He nips. He growls hungrily,

“Like me.”

And she convulses uncontrollably, wishing with every tremor resonating low in her limbs that she could learn to hate the sensation of being between his teeth.

 

˟˟˟˟˟

“Kaleb,” the grade school teacher was saying, frayed, like she had been pulling words from her mouth for a very, very long time, and was tired of it. “Kaleb can you hear me?”

He sat motionless behind a beat up school desk, dangling his feet in the inch of dusty, chalk filled air where his toes couldn’t touch the ground, or didn’t want to. There were lead etches on the slant, dozens of x’s and o’s and hearts that he chewed out with his teeth when no one was watching just to numb the burn; ‘Lucy and Bobby!’ for(N)ever. Sometimes woodchips got stuck in his canines, his gums throbbing in time with the hollow rise and fall of his ten year old chest.

It was beginning slowly, maliciously, on light, sharp toenails. Only he didn’t know it yet.

Everything inside of him whistled with an empty ache. He felt dead spiders whoosh over his ribs and cobwebs bristle his lungs, the lungs that never seemed to move...

And then there was the sharp cartilage jabbing into his cheek; he had brought it with him, sucked on it all through the day, anticipating this moment. It was starting to tickle his throat.

“Kaleb,” she was sighing nasally, all stretched out like twine from a violin. “What did you do this summer?”

The knots of bone in his neck creaked when he forced his jowls upward, his saliva insufficient oil for facing the everyday - the halogen lights from hell, the gooey peanut butter digits and slimy apple slices that made him nauseous. Everything made him nauseous. His eyes were empty matte marbles when he returned her gaze; a tremble crawled down her arm, and he loved the way the skin rippled, danced for him. The question had finally presented itself, like he knew it would. His eyes had shook the night before with premonitions that kept him awake, irises rippling like black satin pools underneath the night sky; he stoked maelstroms silently behind the glass of his corneas.

“Are you going to answer?” she continued with notably less gumption, crossing her arms as if to hold herself together. “The other students have told their stories.”

Silence. And then the harsh words he knew would come.

“Kaleb, you open your mouth this instant or I’m sending you to the office.”

The indisputable specter of Grimness itself glowed maliciously behind his sallow complexion that had painfully contorted into something reminiscent of a smile.

Thin lips parting, a single yellow feather heavy with moisture fell to the floor, echoing like a weight against the silence in the room.

With two long fingers, he extracted a delicate ivory wing from his own molars. He set the bone on the desk, clear liquid sliding down the grain into every x, every o he had carved as the lights above illuminated his wet sadism for all to see.

“Oh – oh my -” she stammered, clasping a hand to her violently fitful chin.

“I ate a bird this summer. A bright yellow canary.” He stared blankly at every stricken child quivering pale as the meal he had regurgitated, threw salty words over their bland existence so that when he feasted on their fear he might have something worth tasting.  

“It was absolutely delicious.”

“I think – I think you should go-”she was panicking. It was so clear, so perfectly obvious that she was near the brink, and oh – how naturally every part of him throbbed to give her a push –

“Teacher, how do you like your eggs?”he breathed uncontrollably.

“S-sunnyside.” Could she dare refuse him?

When he stood to face her his ankles cracked like ice, his skin shed some dust. Two jagged fangs slipped over heart shaped lips which parted delicately as he whispered,

“I like mine raw.” 

As he watched the vomit oozed between her lacquered fingertips, his organs combusted with guttural heat and gasoline, dripping deep down within him. His lips pulsed and throbbed, beating. B(eating).

He was finally full.

˟˟˟

 

She is blind to a time when he did not love to consume, because such a time has never existed.  

 

˟˟˟˟˟

Her father cooks pancakes every Sunday morning. He’s noted it from the scent of brown sugar that sticks to the pine trees outside, the molasses that gleams in the glossy stream with the caramel colored stones at the bottom. It is clear, so clear and sparkling, but he cannot touch it; he never liked the refreshingly clean. It tastes like antiseptic to him, like scalpels and hospitals and all the places they tried to take him before he ran away – like chalk, chalk and chalky white gloves, feeling his arms, his jugular, his tailbone –

He bit a doctor once. Laughed in his face and asked him what was wrong; ‘doesn’t everyone have to eat, sir?’

There’s a sewage drain far past the sweeping hill of her secluded home, far down the crunchy gravel driveway that garners grace from the wheels of her bicycle, and he prefers the distinctly abysmal shade of liquid that pools in the rusted metal cover. It’s as deep red as bricks and blood, and he builds up every pulsing, crusted organ inside of him with damp crumbles of it.

She saw him there once, lapping up dirty rain water like a dog, and even from a distance he could tell that she had smiled in a way that only she could smile. Her teeth form a crescent moon, glow humbly against her milky complexion, subtly. Femininely. Like the lacey eyelet curtains on her second floor window that she always hides behind when she plays peek-a-boo with the world, with him, flicking her white heat face on and off, on and off, like code with candlelight.

 

Her father closes the drapes and her eyelids every night. Opens her drawers instead to make sure the folds and creases are precisely the way he left them, every ripple reminiscent of his long perfected dysfunction that very few can replicate.

Very few want to.

 

˟˟˟˟˟

“Why does that tree look so sharp and mean?”

“Oh my Selene, it’s not mean, that’s just the way it’s branches are bent. It’s natural.”

“I bet it would hurt if I touched it.”

“Only a droplet, a little rosebud of blood, my dear.”

“But daddy can fix that!”

“Oh yes, daddy can fix everything.”

“I has a question.”

“Tell me, baby.”

“When will the tree die?”

A crazed chuckle wrapped sanity around itself as it sprinted across his moist lips.

 “The day you chop it down.”

He kissed her forehead and tucked her in tight, pressing his left thigh against her torso.

With a screech like fingernails down the back of a machine, the window slid shut.

Softly, like her whimpers, the robe fell.

˟˟˟

 

He fluttered his eyelids like butterfly wings made out of steel, tried to read her expression through the fingertips she was holding to his forehead - futile. Pity. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that misery would look stunning against her fading watt smile.

“Is the tree still there?” he asked, nipping at her palms as he spoke. Red orbs began to blossom where her fingers converged as if she was holding dainty pomegranates between them.  A small sob escaped from her lips as his pupils grew wide, black demons awakened by the maddening scent of desire. Her hands fell limp at her sides in defeat so he held her up with his own, fingers tight around her living remains, holding her together as she disintegrated into five little words –

“The tree is still there.”

A sliver of a moon cracked over her chin as her face became the sky. Stars trickled out of her irises and the bluish bags of exhaustion underneath cradled them like blankets, caught them as they were impaled on the summits of her cheekbones.

There is no man in the moon, he thought to himself as his mouth opened wide, only the footprints of wolves.

He kissed her soft and slow before ravaging her completely, considerately, so that she could feel nothing else. She held up her arms in a blissful surrender as he slammed her against wood, absolving him, letting him reach some kind of heaven, some kind of celestial sweetness that had trickled down from the corners of her vision and pooled in her storm cloud tongue.

 

˟˟˟˟˟

I am a glutton for

freshly peppered

punishment.

My mind stews and burns, hot for the handle of

a memory bloodied with

pomegranate juice dribbling down the

blade where I

made out with Eve, stole fruit off of her

original, s_intillating

tongue

and planted the seeds deep,

deep within, up in myself

for a rainy day – like today –

when I could just

fertilize my folds

  with the

    floodwaters

        s u r g i n g

               p u l s i n g

                   through my ve i n s.

I like the way my insides

b       r       e       a         k

at the mere mention of her name –

we juggled knives when

the lights went

owt –

we twisted mirrors into

that aching hollow

                              between one another’s

                              breasts that cry and beg

to be filled just so

we could see ourselves t r e m b l e –

so I could see the way

I g y r a t e

the way

I m o v e

when my legs are split open wide

and I’m raw friction, baby,

spinning on top of these

memories that make me

drip and drop crimson

sex as every recollection  

catches me between its teeth

like the way she planted

hickies on my neck

and ever since then I

like to be naked with

purpling bruises as

my only

dress         

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...MyHomeIsWriting totally spurred this.

I edited this picture a while ago, and I think it fits nicely (or grimly):

Halloween looms and I love it.

...I'm especially good at pretending.