My words are on repeat. Flux of syllables that circle around each other like sharks in the salt water. They repeat. Again and again I explain myself and again and again I am not heard. And the sharks keep swimming, circling in tandem to the rhythm of the sharp consonants ticking like tongues against teeth and full vowels swallowing up warm water. The same words, the same words. And the shark bellies fill with stinging salt and the blood in the waves dances away like ballet shoe ribbons, and I am alone and torn apart; sinking back down to the depths of my brain where the words will circle me again in pursuit. Again and again. A cycling whirlpool of blood stained black and white words.

Halloween doesn't know
that you beat it to the punch line
years ago.

Your jack-o-lantern eyes
glow bright yellow in the spiral staircases
twisting through the coils of my brain.

I never believed in witchcraft
until you spun cobwebs
into your breath
and filled my lungs with spiders.

You are rust brown leaves,
dancing in the rain
with the crescent moon
clothing your skin.

I am rust brown leaves,
suffocating in the fall air
with the crescent moon
blinding my brain.

I saw her standing
on the edge,
still and silvery.
she was an abandoned car
reflecting moonlight
off her cold, metallic exterior.
she was the rusty outline
of a haunted house
whose ghosts didn’t know
it had been knocked down long ago.

she was overlooking
the lights in the darkness,
a silhouette painting against a galaxy
of scattered neon.
a silhouette painting against a galaxy
of broken glass.

she took a step
onto the stars
and
felt the moonlight
fall from her hair
and into
her
bones.

My heart seems always to be crying out for things, pulling me toward things, and shattering me apart because I do not understand its muted beating. It craves sunlight yet thrives in the night. It is tired, it is raggedy, it is hurting and it won’t tell me why. It just speaks in sentences too quiet to understand. It doesn’t even listen to my tears anymore, it just silently waits while I sew myself back together, into a shell for it to hide in once more. It has taken me from my silver, hazy, smokey mind and laid me down on its weary, tired and broken shores. Watches as the salt water gently covers my grey skin, tide inching closer, and turns its back on me while I choke on all the things I cannot control.

This taste in my mouth reminds me too much of the eagerness that would drip out every time I tried to talk to you. My eyes are heavy the way they got that night in the dark, with shadows pressed against them like your fingertips on my body. I have to take a deep breath. I have to breathe in the fall, and the leaves, and the frigid air just to know that I am not there anymore. I just want to close my eyes but they won’t let me see anything but the scars on the inside of my brain that were left there, sliced by fishing hooks. All the remnants of the words you caught me with; hook, line and sinker.