A dying girl
hung her head over
a carpet covered in
crumpled clothes
hastily stripped off and
tossed aside.

Her bed sheets once held
tourniquets and flecks of
splattered blood
that dawn turned to Braille
spelling slow defeat
beneath her bruising skin.

Nine months passed since then.
Those ties cut,
new blood flowed freely through
her ravaged veins.
She knelt beside her bed,
the mattress cloaked in clean sheets.

She shaved away her tangled hair
as if to free the knots from her stomach,
to free from her skull
the ache, the craze,
the hushed torment of
loving ******.

She sliced and slipped
and nicked and bled
to crack her shell of a body until
a soul slipped out
or anything remotely human
but nothing ever did.

She caught herself
moving in a mirror,
body bags beneath her eyes,
a ghostly girl
a stolen soul
a blank mask
a hood of bone.