There’s nothing there anymore
Empty space
A neck without a head

I remember how you taught me to tie my tongue
Or maybe I taught myself
Doesn’t matter

I just wanted to fill the space
So we made nooses on our deathbed
I caught your breath and framed it
‘Holly blooming’
Before asphyxiating

Never did pick up my head from your apartment
You’ve probably moved away
Shifted flesh and become someone else

Doesn’t matter
Never did

There is blood beneath my tips
Nothing escapes it

This city exists
Atop a backbone
Splitting its own flesh

We are all guilty
We are all ******* guilty

The city was hungry. A mewing came from an alley. A hollow exchange.
The innards of the district had been gutted by libertine sons.
We were scared of the silence, so we filled it with shootings, and lynchings, and stabbings, and rapes.
You came an empty reflection. It was the night before the bombs fell. I remember the way my atoms shifted. You lying there in the morning.
We fell into one another, like rabid dogs at corpses.

Limbs lined the streets.
You were distant that day. I broke ******* climbing over a fence, and lined them with the rest.
The radio tower looked abandoned.
You told me three years later you didn’t care either way. I walked you to the bridge and watched you swim the Styx.
I’d never cared from the start.

The world ended soon after.
The moon’s belly cracked, guts spilling onto the earth.
Children pelted one another with flesh. Parents stood in doorways, smiling.
The swell stretched infinitely, reaching neither peak nor fall.
I fell asleep on your grave, nestled in the cold of yesterday’s ache.

Split bone
Sick beneath my skin
Dosed with death

Nobody ******* cared
Doctor came with a casket
And sold me my own bed

I slept til my tongue rotted through my teeth
And all names became foreign streets

There is smoke between your braces
My teeth shatter on touch
It is dry ice; a phantom
There is a blur in your speech
Blood trickles down your gums
And onto your tongue
Stop
Please, stop
Sometimes I wake
To your mouth sealed shut
Because you'd clenched your jaws so hard that blood filled your mouth
I haven't figured it out, but I think
It is the wisp of a nightmare that haunts you
It carries into morning
Settles in the crook of your teeth
To spill long into evening
Look at me
I’m sorry
I bring out the worst in everyone
I trace phantoms into corpses
Long dead but still living in me

There is an other, there, in the mirror. Memory space. A body without a head.
There is movement. Abstract thought.
A girl moves her lips. Air brushes against your own, but it is foreign. The staccato of her breath moulds waves of language. Indivisible meaning that slips your grasp.
Traffic stills. Fumes rise from cracked pavement. A child sleeps under a rusting skyline. A mother overdoses.
It is Autumn. Cold snatches another eight, or eighty. Cells rearrange, and a man finds himself changed. He holds a knife to your throat. You laugh until he cries.
The train comes late. You walk around the block to **** time. You find you no longer recognise the buildings surrounding you.
There is misery in your reflection, but it is just the other looking back and smiling.

I have walked this earth a thousand times.
Dirt. A loose aggregate of particles, held together by gravity, and moisture.
Rain. Water suspended. Resurging. Cascading in plumes, like sheets of smoke.
Sky. Blue. Stretched like canvas. Abstract. Nowhere. Everywhere.
I exist. Here. Standing. Thinking.
I am dead. I am being born.
I am existing across all time and space, but I do not know it.
At this moment, I am trapped. I am unconscious. I am unaware.
I have walked this earth a thousand times, and cannot even remember.
Because it has not happened. Has yet to happen. May never happen.
Future. A nonexistence on the horizon.
Hope. An ache. A nothing replaced with nothing.
Misery. The wretched face in the mirror.
A child wears my eyes. She drifts through life.
Scared. Alone. Free.
She plays in the forest. Her small, sap-covered hands grasp branch after branch.
She enters intermediate school. Is called freak. Is judged by her skin, her eyes.
She realises she is different for the first time.
Alien. Deviant. Other.
Her eyes fill with self-hatred.
I have watched this moment a thousand times, yet can do nothing.
Disintegration. The act of separation.
Loneliness. A billion strangers condemned to live together.
Existence. A billion billion billion particles, shifting beneath my flesh.
There is no death that can end my being.
I have felt the atoms of my past collide, and spark into biology.
I have felt the atoms of my future shred like fractals, spiralling into a dim, dark nothingness.
I have felt all this, and none of it.
From infinity I came, to infinity I’ll go. Forever cycling in the pantomime of existence.
This pretend construct of space and time.