Your rage erodes
through your smiling teeth
and makes holes in
your throat,
spluttering
corrosive through your hearty laugh.
Your rage is like battery acid on your tongue
fueling your acerbic words.

My rage is rope making the ring in which
me, myself and I
battle it out in my head
cyclically.
My rage is a steely triad of me, myself and I
in my mind,
a metal mental instrumental
triangle tapping incessantly
ringing the ting ting ting of
soft subtle slurs.

Our rage is visceral.
Eternally internally infernal,
crackling embers dying within
leaving us shells of ourselves -
warm bodies with blackened ash souls
daring not to breathe should someone notice the smoke.

In predictive text
on my cellular device,
the word suggested after I type
'I'm'
is 'sorry.'

I guess that shows how often I say it.
And if it's me saying it then it shows how often I mean it.

I'm tired of saying it.
Mostly,
I'm tired of meaning it.

"Fake it 'til you make it"
has become
"Faking it IS making it"
and I have grown
weary
of this battle
against myself.

There is no chance of victory
and there is no
love
that will triumph.
Breathing is laborious.
My heart no longer strains through its cage.
My limbs are flaccid and my spine is weak.

All you will find,
should you dare to seek,
is an old carcass with rotting flesh,
a burnt bony cage
within which lies a skewered melting heart
oozing black mess.

I lost her.
She slipped like ashes through my fingers,
leaving only her fingerprints on my fingertips.

I am done trudging through her loss.
There is nothing ahead
and everything that lies behind is obsolete.

I have drawn the line.
I have written these lines.

They say 'when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.'
Had 'they' made lemonade before,
'they' would know just how much sugar is required to do so,
and life rarely throws that at us.
Even if it did, it would be hard to pick up, what with it being dissolved in residual lemon juice and all that.
But that's beside the point.

She stands there being
pummelled
with
lemons.
Not even sour-faced
although the acidity erodes her open wounds.

I ask 'does it not burn?'
She replies 'just tingles like a lemony sun'
and then smiles that crescent silver lining
which tames the acrimonious bite that makes me wince.

Little lemon pip tears drop from my eyes
and she collects them in her palms.
'Just a yellow lemon tree,' she sings in her zestful tone.

She may not be the type to catch, juggle and juice them,
but if she could,
she would be the sugar in her lemonade.

We used to drink tea together.

The tea bag bleeds.
Weeping into hot water,
the sunken sac looking
up to the surface,
spoon-suppression under
tiger lily swirls of earthy aroma.
Blood-orange.

Fish it out -
wrinkled, lame, limp bag.

Milk it
until potpourri dryness ensues,
until the leaves are bitter and lifeless.

Discard it -
the tattered fragile mess.

Now, I am just your tea bag.

You say my name with
that weird drawn out drawling 'a'
and incorrect intonation
but I find affection in your
recurrent mistake
and I love you for it.

You look at me with a mischievous
smirk,
corners of your mouth turned up at different angles,
not exactly Cheshire but still somewhat
eerie and *******
and every time, I give into bubbling laughter.

The way you touched me:
as if every ridge on your finger
-your entire identity-
was capturing the dimensions, curvature of my frame,
the detail
(every beauty spot, every dip, every scar)
only to have you look at me
furrowed
bewildered brow
to ask whether we'd always be this
Happy.

I guess not.