pull off every scale
put each on your tongue
let it dissolve with
the hate on
your lips.

once when I was
less than your fingers
a snake got closer
than your hands.
my mother raised a stick
higher than your chest
and I looked away until
the snake's eyes didn't
look like yours anymore.

twist every rib
around your spineless finger
let it come undone with
the whispers on
your tongue.

I'll look away until
I don't know
your eyes
anymore.

gut me like
a fish.
rip me open from
my throat to the rocks
in my stomach.
see how my
insides are just
worms and worms
and worms.
twisted up they
smell like the
bleach on the
bathroom floor.
bleach coated in
lemons too sweet to
be lemons.
see how they
squirm under
the weight of
your eyes and cracks
in your leather face.
how they
shrivel in your
cherry breath,
too yellow to
be cherries.
lungs full of oranges,
oranges that hate
your chest
and everything
in it.
to the worms you are
just another
fish full of
guts.

you say I'm supposed to be
not like this.
I'm supposed to be
clean.
like you.

your skin slides off your
porcelain bones,
from soaking in the bleach
you have for dinner every night.
your breath consists of
rubbing alcohol and the
plastic covering your mother's sofa.
your insides are curled up and
tired of being dipped in
disinfectant every morning.
that is how you want me to be.
if I am supposed to be clean,
then sterilize me.

run my fingertips over
a flame.
make me into one of
the necklaces you twist
around your spine.
full of all the things
you try to scrape off
your tongue.
a locket full of nothing
but shame.
shave my head and
burn my hair.
take a steel brush
to my teeth.
cut off every freckle and
cauterize the wounds.
force the clean down my throat
every night for dinner
until I am sick with it
every morning.
until I look like how your
insides feel.
it was always
cleanliness above loveliness.
nothing matters more than
being clean.
not to you.
not even me.

gazing in rapture, I am forever
caught between the frequencies;
one of dissolution,
one of incoherence,
strung across a common dissonance.

detached, I drip through
conflicting perceptions,
eternally bound in amber,
I am desensitized;
once by anesthetics,
infinitely by static,
endlessly apologetic.

you should be shoving your
fetid fingers down your throat,
emptying it of everything unholy,
of every drop of acid spat from your lips,
of everyone you ever thought you loved.
you should be sitting naked
on the bathroom floor,
love being soaked up by the tile,
sin melting your skin and
turning it purple like the
orchid on your shoulder.
your face should be
twisted up in the mirror,
eyebrows entwined and
mouth stretched in disgust,
wondering why you are
everything but lovely.

instead I wonder why you were
everything.

stained glass between your teeth
shards of halo down your throat,
like gravel in your palms
the edges open your tongue,
let the devotion turn your
blood to wine,
does it taste holy?
candles spilt over revered words,
from smoke in tinted light
rises a consecrated haze,
with a chest full of
worshiped ash,
you have never felt so hollow.
before eternity and omneity you kneel
as a seraphic sin,
yet you remain sacrosanct.
those with self proclaimed
divinity
have no reason to change.