Dear Ex-Lovers,

i. You were poison to me and I loved to get burnt. How could you leave me lying breathless on the floor wanting more? You used me like an escape and I welcomed it. You filled my head with empty promises; I was just a puppet on your string. Oh darling I should have known I was dancing  with the devil when I was captured in your eyes.

ii. You were my midnight calls and 4am drunk promises. We spent our summer under the moon with poetry written on the back of your palm. I was your everything and for a time, you were mine. But summer is over and I am gone and you are left with the realization I only used you as a muse.

Iii. It started off with shy hugs between you and I. We were misplaced kisses and awkward silence on a Saturday afternoon. You were all push and no pull, I was too. We never tried hard but that's okay; we were only a distraction from the battles we had within.

iv. I always wondered how I could love someone as cold as you. I was your blanket and you were always trying to keep warm. Maybe you needed a reason to keep trying in this turbulent world and maybe I just loved to play with broken things, but three months have passed and I still sit by your grave and wonder if all I ever did was suffocate the little candle you had burning within.
-V

Mother warned me not to fall for girls who turn their
bodies into a trick of light whenever you are with them.
“Careful with the pretty ones,” she would say. Smiles that can
launch a thousand ships and start civil wars were never any good.
“Be a lover, not a muse,” she would say. Careful of the girls
who love what you bring but never love who you are.
“The devil was an angel once,” she would say. He was pretty eyes
with an angelic voice and temptation in it's purest form.
Oh how mother knows best; how I never learned.
-V

Imagine, if you will, a boy. A boy with dark hair and soft, pretty eyes framed by long lashes. And you want this boy. You want to reach inside him, pull out his still-beating heart, and swallow it whole. You want to peel off his skin, inch by inch, crawl inside of it, and never let go. You want to pull him apart, limb by limb, until you've studied every inch of him. You want him to put his hands inside you. Deep down into parts of yourself you forgot existed. You want him to soothe the ache he left in your chest.

Photographers step out of hazy stairwells, tired eyes adjusting to dim light, looking for
their next muse.
“Works of art take time” they tell themselves
they look for the next spark of intrigue, their next fix.
You’ll find them on public transport, in old cafes:
cameras slung around their necks like billiard boards captioned ‘the end is nigh’.
Buzzing with anticipation of their next good catch, biting the lips of their disgruntled
faces like ancient gladiators biting the dust.
Castaways, oil paintings once brilliant and beautiful thrown into apartment blocks and
grey buildings,
ruins of art cast adrift by time.
Haunted by still frames and possibilities, all burned onto retinas, they stumble across
traffic jams;
finding beautiful people, forcing themselves into their lives.
Fleeting whispers rotate into double takes and flickers on the film of a Polaroid camera;
the subjects become muses,
cities are reborn as golden
flood into spotlights:
vibrant, reckless, insomniac.