A Love Poem to Decaying Memories and the Deterioration of One's Sense of Self

 This is truthfully the worst one yet.

Rot Intoxication 

I can no longer see any lights

Left reaching out through the perpetual grayness

Over the sea of dried, wheezing insects 

Stretched out between the two of us,

Where we once stood merged together 

Contorting within each other’s flesh.

Now long deserted,

Stuck in an ever-lasting night 

Consumed by a reverberating, crescendoing hiss

From my legion of cockroaches

All feasting on grossly severed chunks 

Fallen from our ugly, sudden dismemberment

While noxiously perfumed wind

Sings songs of burning memories, 

Wailing hymns of self-immolation 

Drumming in my dust-filled eye sockets,

A grim procession of vivid images in broken glass mosaics 

Flash with every pounding beat.

Until a soft voice 

Circulating wildly in the leaden,

Radioactive air

Whispers into the gashes lining my head

Urging me closer to the eroded precipice,

Looking down

Hiding behind what remains of my hands

Blotches of skin still clinging to tattooed bones,

My only source of sustenance,

I shred away and watch 

My forced resignations

Drifting down into ailing trenches 

Overflowing 

With smothered refugee stillbirths,

Mother’s nails embedded in their pinkish necks, 

And crackling mutated kewpies

Tumbling out of furnaces,

All with the date of our armageddon 

You carefully etched into each one of their

Broken little palms. 

Still alone on the cliffside,

Toppled caravan sinking into mud,

Wrapped in my bed of vulture wings 

And veiny blankets 

Of agent orange-drenched flesh,

Remnants of our carnival at my feet,

Vestigial grins buried under smoldering circus tents

Suicidal stars choking in the dust of planets

Rotting into mockeries of your effigy 

Flowing through the poisoned dawn.

Time crawls on butchered limbs,

I’m sending messages 

Out of my exploding diseased pustules,

Straining my petrified lips,

My fractured, unhinged jaw,

To try and kiss

Disappearing remembrances of your form.

It all mists into bloodied spiders and knives

Weaving through yellowed atmosphere.

Drowning in the rain of ether,

There’s nowhere to run to

As I’m forced to bear witness

To my last lingering memories of you

Fading into imploding voids 

And discarded renditions of different lives

I thought we’d share.

Further out;

The northern city lies decimated

Folding into its industrial ruins

Shards of the moon 

Melting into acid baths 

Ensuring that where we once resided

Where we once escaped into 

Each other’s open wounds, 

Can no longer exist

Or at least not for you, 

Wherever remnants of your mind 

Now choose to escape to.

But memories,

No matter how horrid,

Barbed-up 

And venomous as they can be,

Are all I have left.

I remember the destroyed room

The cockroach bath

Perched high above the

Last exit for the Lost

Dressing up in your incense smoke 

Drawing the worm-eaten curtains

Hiding behind the cobwebs

To tear away at each other,

Enfolding you, 

Bullets and gleaming ghosts 

Reflecting in the melding of our eyes 

Your moan surging through my opened veins,

Watching you writhe 

As the bombs fell right outside 

Into the rapidly depopulating street. 

Nothing

And no one could possibly exist

Other than you

And your cracked porcelain 

Dazzling with impossible light,

Reflecting the mushroom clouds

Catching up behind

Our doomed, lip-locked heads.

I still don’t know how to survive 

As the only one left

In the prolonged apocalypse 

You brought forth.

-

Now at the end of it all,

I manage to pull myself up

To look out across 

An infinite horizon painted over

With scabbed and diseased masks

Seeping infection

And sickly fragrant, inviting death.

I see a year stretch past without you,

All entwined 

With squirming waves of exoskeletons,

Insect larvae baking in the sun,

I’d rather drown in it

Than have to sink any further

Deeper into my hollowed self. 

There’s no point in this,

There’s no existence possible

With only me still breathing. 

I’ll never let you go,

And even as all memories pass,

As the world disappears,

As the insects take apart humanity 

Piece by piece 

I’ll still hold on to you

Even as you watch me rot. 

 

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