I deserve this
Don't I?
It was my battle to win
In a war far from won
Who will take my reward from my arms?
Who would squelch the music in my ears
Or explain it's virtues with cold theory?
I have seized the moment
The day I have called my own
Will the morning sunrise expect me to be content
With victorious yesterday
Will the calendar's relentless trajectory
Put me back in my place
A paradigm of depression where I've convinced myself
I belong
Doomed to breathe borrowed oxygen
Or will chemicals and sleep
Ease me into another easy day?
Who among you would take that away?

My afternoons have been spent listening to her
And her mind-numbing jazz, the trumpets
and the trombones, the bass guitar and the piano.
I'm almost tone deaf but, god, I could feel her soul
through her songs. She has caught me
like how liquor stared back at me
with her golden stare
As the ice begins to sweat.

After school she would teach me
How to handle her instruments:
The soprano, the alto and the tenor.
The former, we would practice often at her whim;
Her favorite sax which even with a few notes,
she'd ask me to play with her.

In her own words, "You have to imagine"
"Making love to your instrument."
"Imagine me", she said.
And for the first time I heard her play
Pink panther off key.

let us be junkies
bleed together
tremble as our blood is cleansed
from this, our senseless craving.
there is heaviness upon our chests
our breath staggering
from the jagged sharpness of memories
peeling the fresh edge of our wounds
freely flowing now,
leave us just the hint of death
upon our pale, spent skin.

alone.
i feel alone.
i am muted as i recede
from the fury of my addiction,
hearing alone my agonizing cry
my flesh shredded
my bones crushed
my tears crusted
its meaning has long left me
curled and cold in a corner
with the wan smile of surviving...
there is no pity left in the melting.

somehow, i forgot
how hell would figure in this,
my make-believe heaven.
where with each gaze,
you bare my soul
with each breath,
you burst me raw and dripping
with your fingertips
you strip me into my elements
and have me dance buck-wild
soaked in the perfect concoction
of madness and affection
stewed in boiling buckets of ***,
as thick as love slathered
upon our irreverent whispering lips...

but hell has arrived
silent, thoughtful, real...
i feel it creeping in this empty room
where  the fulminant joy of your laughter
fades into a hollow echo
and your eyes are somewhere else
where the light of the sun
is not blue but grey.
you are oozing from my open vein
and i am numb
hell has arrived
at the break of a dark winter.
i succumb to my fate
an unrepentant, miserable ******
wallowing in shaking fits,
my vulnerable shell in a million shattered shards by my feet,
looking at the permanence of your tracks
as you walk away...