every lie is a *****, rusting, digging into more of what lives in my chest. if you can imagine how a spider's walk sounds, then you'll hear my brown bones closing over this thing that is red. my body is a crowd of one, a room full of me: i stay caged between 4 walls, and it is lonely.

be still so the hounds don't bring you down, not so still that they win without a fight. be still, red thing, but not so still that you may never move again. the world has an appetite for your kind of soul: their mouths, yours too, will be used against you; they'll swallow your tongue and say it was their food.

confined to this live-wire city, you wonder if you chose to be unseen. you wonder when you stopped seeing, too, stopped being a girl with a mouth full of teeth and a red rose that bloomed when she would sing, dance, dream, a girl with less to care for and more to care about, a girl who knew a thing before she was told how she ought to know it.

so what do i know? i sit in this car, i go up this road following signs that read 'home', watching traffic lights come and then go, greening it all the way to the highest hilltop. but mountains tower in the backdrop, the way down becomes an endless ***** and these burning lamps line the sides in warning, urging me to keep to the road.

there is wind in my hair, stars in the radio, and the man in the passenger seat is someone i won't know. he has brown eyes, warm skin, a Cheshire cat grin, and he is everything i hoped he would be, it's unreal. he's here in this scene, in the credits to a movie that plays on repeat, with me on this road to a home that never shows.

and everything bows to the clock anyway so i take charge of the man, the car and the stars, i take charge of the hounds and the spider in my mouth, i take charge of the heart and the bones and the dark, and i let the clock pull me out, out, out and into the arms of something new.