i cant remember a word that you were saying
but i remember every single drop of venom
that fell from your fangs the night that you
infected me with death and decay and refractum,
refractus, broken up or open in a dead language
that still stings in hexes and wills the dead
to life. necromancy is your specialty, commanding
a skeletal army to all your evil bidding, all
collar bones and wrist bones and bony knees
scraped up from all the tripping you've been up to,
running through thickets away from the white lie
of an elephant that haunts your room, conjured
from when you dug up the graves of every single
name that i tried to lay to rest, every action and
reaction and dejection and rejection and destructive
tendency, tendencies, tending to distract from
the subject matter at hand, the rules bent and broken
as you spit your poisonous latin palaver,
empty talk to move the empty skulls of your pawns,
empty threats of empty memories that no longer
have any kind of meaning to me. i laid them to rest.
i held their funerals a long time ago, and there's
nothing you can hold over me besides the skeletons
you left in your closet, that you never bothered to bury.
the dead don't scare me, not anymore, and i've
developed an immunity to your toxicity so that
you don't scare me anymore, not anymore,
because you're just another passed-on memory.
i will never forget the venom that drips from your
lips, but i will not let it run through my veins anymore.
your dead words and dead memories are all uttered
in a dead language, not spoken anymore, not real,
a dead effect that cannot touch anything because
memories lack tangibility, dead regrets in a dead
language that got buried when i decided to stop
listening.