when you smile only your lips move
you’re a beautiful portrait of starched shirts and graceful misery
a whole tragedy told in your bared teeth and narrowed eyes.

when the soft moonlight runs down your face
all i see is plastic flesh and fine lines
jagged edges, discolored hollows—a broken sort of beauty.

the cigarettes and alcohol run electric in your veins;
you are gunpowder and grenadine, razor
    blades and tar. sticky and corroding, sharp and broken.

you wear your jaundice like a punishment
a rotting underneath a supple olive complexion,
from the neglected depths of your weary body.

you are a child with an old man’s scars.
your lost youth poisoned with a misery so heavy
it’s as if you've seen the world and lived through it twice.

you inhale the wild air and you breathe out toxins:
everything about you is decaying and rotting and dying
but in your erratic pulse i hear a muted plea: don’t let me die.

so i lean over, and into you
and let you take in the oxygen of my lungs
and the lingering mint on my tongue.

breathe me:
let me save you from drowning
in lungfuls of nicotine numbness and hallucinogen delusions.

for you in full blossom, i inhale
and exhale the ephemeral, dissonant beauty of your mortality.