City came underwater
Circling itself
Fumbling through wet cloth
Rain soaked, rain soaked

Flooded all the mean streets
Dead ends
Singing like the cold stream
Running through our summer sweat

That moment ten years ago
Swore we’d die, but not like this
Broken like the old oak
Salt on your lips

We made nests in clocks
that Summer the electricity died.
Stars rose out of the ether for the first time in centuries.

Autumn rolled in
but it only grew hotter.
We climbed on rooftops to escape the heat of our homes
and saw the silhouettes of strangers follow.

Winter choked the freeways, the subways, the old ways.
Rust fell on us like rain.
We danced in the belly of an abandoned ship
cheeks burning with mirth.

By Spring
the plants had withered
and the animals had slept until their bodies devoured their souls.
We sat on the town hall as the sun engulfed the sky
Thankful for such a beautiful life.

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.

No, that’s not how it goes.
Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
It was a forest.
No, it was black, like tar. It tasted like broken glass.
I remember the incense on the drapes.
Yes. It clung to our clothes.
You cried.
No, I smiled.
You cried smiling.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
No.
Um. Sometimes it feels like the world is too crowded with words. Like it's too dense to speak.
That--
Like there’s something in the air that pushes against my throat.
There was a black dog, just then.
What?
Outside. It’s gone now. Sorry. Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
There was a raven.
Yes.
It was black like tar.
It caught a worm once.
Ravens don’t eat worms.
Yeah. It just sat there, with the worm in its beak. The worm squirmed, wrapping itself round the beak, over and over.
Is that why you were crying?
It wouldn’t stop. It kept going, digging its flesh deeper into the edges.
What was your father doing?
Smiling.
Why?
He’d filed for a divorce earlier.
Right. I wasn’t there.
No, you weren’t.
Do you regret locking the doors?
Sometimes I can taste the rain before it comes. It’s a skill I’ve had for as long as I can remember.
I’m lost. So your father was smiling?
No, he was crying.
Sorry. I swear I just--nevermind. Start again.
There was a storm in these parts when we were young. The worst storm in a hundred years.
I don’t remember.
You slept through it. I held your hand all night.
Why?
Because I was alone.
You still are.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
Yes.
Where have you been?
Everywhere but here.
And where will you go?
Nowhere.
Sometimes when I look at you, it’s like looking through static. It’s like I’m looking at an impression of a person.
I get that a lot.
It’s like all my memories of you have blurred together. Vague feelings rise out of the haze. Feelings I recognise, yet cannot describe. I cannot connect them with who you are, what we were, or where we’ve been. It’s--
Like exiting a dream.
Yes. Exactly.
You feel a gap in your soul. One that has always been.
Always been. You held my hand, once.
During the worst storm in a hundred years.
When was that?
Every night.

I can taste her scent, riding on the morning breeze. It is of empty swing sets; dead Autumn leaves.
It is unnaturally cold. She is waiting for me, but I cannot find her.
Summer has fled my skin.
I sink with each step. I cry out, but my mouth stays closed.
I cannot find her. I cannot find her. I cannot—

I am staring into a convenience store. Gaudy labels, bright neon.
The air smells of soy sauce and sweat. A foreign sun blinds me.
Lucy’s father is waiting for his receipt, hand stretched for eternity.
I want to scream out. I want to run up to him and shake him loose of the death that will consume him and his family.
But all I can do is sink; hand stretched for eternity.

I am crying. There is a luggage bag in the hallway, clothes strewn to its side.
Mother is shouting, but she does not know it.
‘Ten more years’, she says, ‘ten more years’. I have never seen father so angry.
I don’t want to watch. I want to disappear. I want to sink into the walls.
My existence has led to this moment; this moment that I will not understand for another eight years.
‘Ten more years.’ Mother slams the door. An engine starts, but I am gone.

Perhaps, I never resurface.

Jesus came wrapped in paper and coated in tape
Saw the sender and fell to my knees
Felt my body sink right through the earth
Felt time reverse

Was a child crying beneath the bridge
Watched his mother and father pulled to the sea
Stopped for a moment before pretending
I didn’t see a ******* thing

Should have opened my heart long ago
******* wasted on my own problems

I crawled through service
I collapsed at the grave

Can’t shake the sweat from my tips
Can’t wash the guilt from my sheets
What the hell happened to me?
What the hell happened?

It’s hard to see you here
In a summer heat I no longer remember

Maybe I smiled once
And you smiled back.

This vacant warmth
I ******* hate it

I think I lapsed and missed my own funeral
Shrugged and felt my head roll off
But did nothing

Because what’s the point, anyway?
What’s the ******* point?

Smoke under your clothes
Who’d know?
Summer died beneath you
In some apartment we ****** in

Come away
She’s adrift

Kissed her shadow
Dozed the district

Did you really think these ghosts would vanish?
Mr. Mrs.

Wear me white
Wear me white

Dragging my head on the ground
No one, no one’s
I’m catching death on my lips

Sliver off my flesh
Heart’s beating bruises
Well, there’s nothing here but nothing
So give up

Won’t you wear me like a sweater?
Drape me loose across your legs?
Tie me to the bottom of your nothing head?

Kiss me till I turn to dust
Kiss me till I turn

I’ll believe in something when I’m dead
We’re all just passing over each other’s empty skin
Don’t pretend anything
Life’s as worthless as it seems

Swallow your glass whole
Nothing will
Burning through your open closed
Swing, miss, swing

There’s an empty grave beneath the park
Where smiling children sing hymns to a silent dark

Who was suffocating
Once here, or nowhere?
Yellow toothed maniac
Down, dead, dying

I’ve worn my neck right through
Thinking of you

I was born warm and lonely
An ocean to swim free
Gold and empty
Suffocating
A mother’s warmth sung saintly

Lord above and beyond
Father never felt so strong
As the days he made currents over headless homes

She would kneel like mother Mary
Lips quivering haste
And he’d raise his arms to the heavens
To strike her ablaze

Every Sunday morning
I’d watch her sing through swollen lips
So filled with veneration
For a God that couldn’t exist

No hymn that left her
Ever helped her
God save her
******* save her

I was born again on a church pew
Where I left my rusted cross beside my youth

Lovers in the lines disappearing
Folding fading

Hazy in the midnight
Waning grey

My eyes were flickering lights
Passing stories unsaid
And a comfort I can’t remember

Curve gone crooked
I left my head here
I left my head

Misread your softness
Misspoke some promise
Blurred in the wind

Guess it means nothing
95 or not
Drop out
Drag on
**** up

I hate this potential
Nervous burns wander my skin
Reciting old poetry

Expect nothing
I keep saying
Expect nothing

Remember the morning after
How we bathed in cypress
So we’d live forever?

I talked circles round your neck
And settled in the empty space your body left

I have learnt that silence kills
Just as easily as time

Wear your beliefs
Like a half-cross set irrevocably
On the tip of your tongue
Thirty silvers in sum

You hold doctrine
Like a sinner postcoital
Of an ecstasy
Wane and fleeting

She held him within her. A coiled mosaic, whirling on the precipice. His frame shook tumultuous, his skin the colour of autumn grey. The wetness from his eyes spilled against her soft fur. He pressed his lids tighter, as if to keep his tears from the world. Warmth pooled beneath their paws, a thick ichor that smelled of iron and salt.
The dusk receded, and he breathed his last.
Night left the world a husk. A slumber, cessation. In the still, she felt a chill gather within her, cruel and implacable. The forest stirred, with a restlessness only the dead knew. The barrows shrivelled to their skeleton frames. Death lurked in the furs of the pitch beast, in the mottle snares of the witherfang.
She ****** them all.
Her howl tore through the air, bright and gleaming. It thundered beneath the earth, reverberating through the bones of the long deceased. How had she once felt pride in that sound? A bitter rage roiled in her blood. It twisted the vessels of her body, and set her muscles to stone. She moved and shattered into a thousand shards, each one sharper than the last.
She grieved for two days. The soft contours she’d held his dying body against grew lean and taut. The hollows of her ribs had closed themselves around a seething stone, that filled her flesh bitter. She rose a new beast on the third day. Smarter, but crueller; wiser, but filled with rage; and with only one thought on her mind.
She would find the deceiver, and devour all he loved.

Lily erode
Eros rapture
To dust
To dust
To dust

I found ache in your whispers
Warmth in your bones
The wind whistled through your body
But I was home

All these beautiful people taste like death

Red black red black
There is nothing more

Traffic runs endless through the gutter Styx

This city is an empty vessel
With mass every day
Triumphantly awaiting its own pointless decay

All that lead in their bones
Smoke lingering blood

They placed masks on their graves
Unmarked in kitchens
And fields of grain
Washed out and bitterly red
Against a blue white skin

Liberty fell with her rifle
Pointed at her own knees
Crown set a gutter for soldiers to cower and puke in their false beliefs

The only absolute in this ******* war is death
You freedom ******* hypocrites

Tastes like death
Tongue to the gallows
Winter in her veins

All flesh fails
Maggots run empty
Gorged headless
Enfolding
Imprinting

Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing
Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing
Limbs twined to the bone
Reap nothing

We march
Withering white
All seas to dust

The ground caves in
The earth grows hollow

Ribs through the skin
Teeth through the lips
Breath catching black

We march
In a ceaseless beat
To the rhythm of dead machines
Over cracked roads
And empty homes

We shift
Shuffling deadbeats
Wind south
Wind north

Biting to be
Filter the lungs
Breathe in the smoke
Fill in the guts

Consume me, consume me
Gnaw, gnaw, gnaw
Salivate static
Want, want, want

It’s no wonder we’ve grown endless teeth
Beneath our loveless grins

Can we even
Part the crowd
Anymore?

He buried the arm.
Black dirt, cracked under a blazing sun.
His bones slid stiffly into one another; shovel slipped from sweat.
He’d covered the face already. A pale mask of serenity with burnt black sockets.
Dead leaves blew past his legs. The house shook. Boards rattled against the wind.
A paperboy passed by.
What a stupid waste of flesh.
He waved.
******** stupid.

Settle black darling
In the crook of my ribs
Eat out my lungs

I’ll blow smoke when I wake
—Thunderclouds

Two thousand years
Regressing past the cross
Lead bites bitter as bronze
Gaza rages

The brimstone and fire you promised
You delivered
Apostle bound crusader
Jewish Lucifer

There is no hope.
We walked in circles round the worm, its amorphous purpose lost on us. A sleek, black, rotting corpse, buried within skyscrapers and city streets. We could see no end to it. Everyone had done their best to avoid mention, even as traffic backed, markets stalled and entire city blocks went down.
The pier was bustling at noon. Sweet, burning, haze of smells. Business men wandered out for lunch, laughing to themselves as they secretly wondered how they’d pass the black mass. Children scurried round it, morbidly curious. Their parents would wring their hands, shooting sights at everything but the worm. A throng of oblivious teens skated into it and were knocked flat on their backs. A business man stepped over the moaning mass, eating a hot dog.
Three days passed and nothing had been done. The smell worsened.
The media continued their daily fluster. Weather. Sports. Local news. Farmer John had gotten pink eye again. They held awkward smiles in their teeth, and deadpan concern in their crows feet. His meat would be safe once cooked.
The government were curiously absent.
Conspiracists were already calling it Non-entity 012. The world worm. The dead god in the room.
If we close our eyes, will it disappear?

-- Anonymous Male. New York, USA.

Lush draped the walls
Gold freckles cheek to collar
I shook the dust from my lips
And lost hours

I left kisses on dead children
Old as the houses
I grew friends in the field out back
Under dead forests

Guilt
Shattered glass
They’ll cease existing
When I pass

Some hurts feel too often
Like old love

Main street
The ebb of traffic leaves me sick

This is a city of repetitious fits
Transparent monotony

I can see beating a dead horse
Is still in fashion

Willow came apart
Morning rose without a sun
Flushed pink

The corners of her lips
Yearned with decade old creases
And we all scraped bark from our mouths

Your cesspool culture
******* disgusts me

I keep hearing white men in power
Telling me **** culture doesn’t exist
While **** shaming single mothers
And gang ***** minors

Guilty until proven guilty
Where the hell did you learn to lead?
Well spoken white trash ******
Spit polished bigotry

I can taste your bones in my mouth
decadent, exhausted

you peeled my skin back
and watched me burn brighter than the skyline on fire
pierced reds pulsing pitch

I left the morning with my head on your pavement
staring into nothing

Blunt ****
Your grin brings the whole world down
So shallow you turn your guts inside out
Come bury your teeth in the gutter
Headless ****
Privileged ****

I wake from fading dreams
of soft hymns
and summer skin

Perhaps this is what it’s like
to be at peace

I’m scratching my cheekbones
Gripping at cavities
And white noise

I just wanted to fill my lungs
With corrosive apathy
And feel my ribs shatter free

I spoke in nervous tones
On the day of your death
And found myself lacking all sensory depth

Some time next Spring
All the flowers eroded
And I couldn’t care less

I looked at my reflection and saw everything I hated
In the form of where you used to stand
And what was now left in its place

Gaunt and bitter
I adorned your absence
Like a crown
Hollow as my chest

Wilt my lungs
I’ll breathe in bitter bloom
And fill my chest with concrete tombs

At twenty one I exhaled tar
And covered my birthday cake

Ribs for the skyline
This city built a church round my heart
Before some gutter punks spray painted the side of the stained glass
With the suicide rates of middle-class citizens

Nothing has been the same since

When I was young
I was raised on Disney
And taught that my bones were living things

At thirteen years old
I nestled a heart within the clouds and smoke of my chest
It suffocated to death

I’ve never broken a bone
But I’ve trailed plenty of marrow

Apart in my lust
I separate
Disconnect
Break

There’s an infinite space where these fingers once entwined
I rise above my own flesh just to watch it die

Languorous apathy
I slept as death whispered
Through the murk of my self-inflicted
Desolation
Regressing until my heart withered from its bones

Autumn reminds me of black leaves and dead lips
adolescence left to die on empty swing sets