You are the cigarette I can’t put down
An ache held deep in my chest
After I’m done I hate the taste in my mouth
You burn hot and you burn out fast
Never takes long for **** to go south
I swear each time will be the last
The next day I buy another pack
I light you up and **** you down
I look in the mirror; it starts to crack
Others notice I’m dropping weight
30 lbs in 2 months, a strict diet of devotion and hate
My grandma tells me I look great
What’s my secret?
Cigarettes and you; keep washing me away
I’m burning up too fast too drown
Still I can’t put you or this ******* cigarette down

Pink athletic shorts
Bursting at the seams
With all this new body
Hips and waist and ***
You said
“It’s about time to retire those don’t you think?”
2 months later
They hang loosely past my hip bones
Hiding the body that dissolved
The person who is no longer there
And I’m glad I kept them
So they could swallow me whole

I realized
as I aged that
my own intensity was not easily weathered by any man. Or any person.
My almond eyes were Venus flytraps
to the ghosts of my past who were drawn in all too quickly,
only to be devoured by their ceaseless lust and depraved need.
There was no dial to my passion, once awakened it could only be suppressed to a dull roar.
Many who met my gaze disintegrated before me into piles of dust and rubble and hollow disappointment.
They say eyes are the window to the soul, and I thought mine was host to a terrible demon or succubus.
I only discovered as my brain finished stitching together in my early adulthood that it is not demons who crumble weak men with their eyes, but goddesses

Confrontations of candor
Bittersweet release
Relentless ghosts whisper
“The devil is in the details”

Chemical haze; colored sands of stark contrast
I can’t seem to sift through
Tight grips
White knuckled grasping
It runs through my fingertips regardless

A heart stitched together with scar tissue
Thick, white lines etched carefully on thighs
If my heart grows
Will I find stretch marks there, too?

Silky smooth tracing
With bony fingertips
The birth of fresh skin cells
Each year more and more
Skin dissolves into dust from before
It runs through my fingertips regardless

The girl with the protruding rib cage
With fire just behind
Blue-green, ever-shifting eyes
She branded passion into her arms
With a lit cigarette

Eyes that only saw black or white
Torment suffered red
Pain inflicted blue
Fused into monochrome shades of slate

Digging up her grave
Clawing at the dirt and sand
Until blood runs down soft hands
Struggling to separate the two
Dry, dry sand
It slips through my fingertips regardless