Why Try?

Exposed and Dismantled

An unnatural habitation

Botched, discolored sideshow surgery

Pitifully deserted

Coiled wrongly in a blood pocket

In between broken ribs,

The hum of electronic sutures,

Organic instruments of personal dissection

Pluck away at the necrotic nerve endings

Once binding us together,

In anxious recoil, they shrivel and shrink

Like a long-gone wilted flower

Curved dead petals blanket the encroaching isolation

Dissolving into dried flecks

Of menstrual dust

And strained, ivy-covered muscles

Snaking together and opening us up

To willingly drink your disease

Harvesting in my spliced open gut

Stilted, heavy August air runs ablaze

With ugly echoes

Of the familiar saccharine cry for help

That once escaped

Out the throat we shared.

We were the architects of our fate,

A writhing union bringing forth

False Satori,

How long did I spend face-to-face

With the bitter end?

All so far removed,

A begging leper eating his jaw

Stranded in the lost trenches of the Atlantic

Festering inwardly, foundation of burning desire

Rots away the wrinkled tissue

Last image of you, lost in the foreign airport

Suffused in dazzling shadows

Etched into the loosening eyeball

As it squeals, hisses, and pops.

Like fleshy soap scum

Gliding as a puddle of fog

On the ocean’s skimmed surface,

An abattoir of memories

Evaporates into imploding brick walls

Threatening to bludgeon the Earth.

Our destroyed history stranded on the surface

Tar-black trees sprout unnaturally from porous sand,

Limits of what could have been seized up in degeneration

A celestial unclean, dripping sorrows

Terraform the impossible distance

Where have you been?

Weary whisper of trauma lost in endless replay

Ritualistic tape-loop of redefinition

All in exploding pastel colors

Painting the supernova found within my chest cavity,

Nothing that can be said aloud

A fountain of chemical misfortunes

Phantasmagoria of unopened letters

Squelching guts painstakingly stuffed in various envelopes

Left reeking,

Leaking empty words

Under a cleaved-open

Corpse-gray

England sky.

Crawling generational chaos seeps from your doorstep,

Carry my bleeding ink away

It’s only the remaining evidence

Of what you found when I peeled myself back,

Dismantled my walls

For you to consume

The crying little miscarriages tumbling out of their jars,

Stuck between pulsating bricks, slowly disintegrating

Our ashen heart valves hidden underneath the mortar

The vulnerable emotional ugliness you ran away from

Was my love begotten.

Remaining identity defined by unholy severance

I clothe myself with razor blades

And sew myself back up

With interlocking lacerations

Inscribing your effigy,

Red and raised with infection.