clock-tick,
latch-click,
footsteps darting down the stairs--
you're...gone!
*
Fingertips of night smudge and smear their ebony gloss streaks
Down dusty, grimy glass--
Swallowing your spectral image
In the glazed glow of neon-rainbow billboards.
A twenty-first century Lancelot, you don your callousness
And self-loathing like a tarnished suit of armor--
On a chilviarous quest to save two-hundred-dollar Nocturne Ladies
From drug-primed pimps....
T h e m s e l v e s.....
But--n o t from you!
Passions fire, and my love, follow you
Through myriads of abandoned, midnight alleyways,
And already I have squandered the ghosts
Of your deceptive warmth, and poisoned promises.
The heaviest of down comforters
Fail to cease my chills
And I am as bloodless
As before your first lethal kisses.
Your inevitable absence is the deep burn of frostbite,
Your eventual return an addiction--
The relief insatiable neuralgia--
I c r a v e your presence.
Your vanishing is like slicing away strips of my skin--
The carving, and cutting release a chronic, arctic cold
That confronts me from within my crystalized soul....
I freeze, and die, e a c h time you leave.
**
From within the hollow of our bed
The mist of a heroine-induced haze rises--
Enfolded in the memory of your lingering lust, I slip
between the sweat-soaked sheets, and pain-drenched pillows....
Longing...promising...hoping...that I'll be gone--t o m o r r o w.....
Waiting...bargaining with the darkness...listening to.....
clock-tick,
latch-click,
your footsteps stumbling up the stairs.............
Sometimes--relationships are simply mutally-enabling.....T O X I C I T Y
