I’m your 5-minute cigarette break,
Ghosting across your lips as you breathe me in.
You set me ablaze and use me, abuse me,
Until neither of us can recognize who we are anymore.
You’ve tried to quit me, to forget me
Among the discarded piles of ash.
But the scent of smoke lingers
even after the fire dies down:
I know you’ll be back for more.
You may hate me, but you need me.
After all, it only takes a match and a kiss
For both of us to feel alive.

By 19 she had forgotten how to smile
Wiping the running mascara from her eyelids
And the blood from the corner of her mouth.
Gone girl, growing up unchecked in the bathroom of a seedy bar
Her smudged kisses on the cracked mirror an offering
to the place she calls her temple.
She is the goddess of Ecstasy and having too much to drink,
Stumbling with strangers through the city, falling into taxis,
And waking up somewhere new every morning.
It was she invented the walk of shame,
And mastered the art of forgetting who she was.
The nightlife angel, sticky with champagne,
Gorgeous and passed out on the cement,
Her innocence left behind in a trail of glitter,
Broken bottles, and whatever it was she took last night.

Two simultaneous symphonies
Play in my head-
One completely off key
One not quite up to speed
I close my eyes and breathe
Count 1, 2, 3 and say
Let there be nothing!
And there is nothing
For precisely two seconds
Till the music creeps back
More fragmented than before.
Is sleep voluntary like dancing
Involuntary like heartbeats
Or a combination like breathing
Or blinking
Do other people have orchestras warring in their head?

There are worse things than dying, like being in love for example.
Falling in love is like falling asleep at the wheel of a car with someone in the passenger seat--
Everything is okay until it’s not and you are both broken and bleeding and she’s crying and all you can think to say is **** my bad.
I should have known better than to operate a motor vehicle while under the influence of something as poisonous as love.
But the downsides are much clearer from the other side of a shattered windshield.
I can’t help but wonder if beneath all my blood the grass is greener than where I came from.
It isn’t.

Fuse ignited by the half-lit cigarette
perched precariously on the corner of your mouth,
I'm a suicide bomber,
and you are all I have left to believe in.
Side by side,
Our lungs screaming,
we torch the world around us,
destroying perfection to create beauty.
We rise again from the smoldering wreckage,
cleansed with the spilled blood of our broken hearts.
The embers drift in the sky like fireflies
as we wipe the ash from our eyes.
Hands clasped,
we venture forth into this brave new world,
rebuilding reality brick by brick
and from each other,
learning to love again.

She was a bad taste I couldn’t help but swallow. Eyes like the last day of autumn, cold and unforgiving, their best days behind them. She had lips lined with the promise of a lie and hands that could bruise as much as they could heal. What else could I do? I drank her poison. I’m walking a fine line between losing myself and gaining even less. Maybe our mouths weren’t meant to kiss each other but sometimes a little wrong can feel right. After all, neither of us were ever complete to begin with. Just fragments, seeking to fit our tattered edges into someone else’s. Looking to fall in love but settling just to fall.

You are my apocalypse,
in your eyes I first glimpsed the end of the world.
I craved the destruction in your lips.
(I was well aware this was killing me slowly.)

Our love is my suicide,
my manifesto, so to speak.
You named my pain and told me it'll never fade.
You became the only way to numb it.

You're draining me, I know.
Consuming my mind and body with a well-time crooked smile.
I'm beginning to wonder if I mean a thing to you,
or if I'm just the means to your end.

Alone together we gasp for a cure,
thinking we belong simply because we don't.
Forcing together our broken hearts,
bandaging our scars to fake being complete.

You're ****** up and I'm ****** up
and this world is ****** up, too.
So let's pull the trigger and cross the wires,
hands clasped together, becoming the end.