Emotions boom
like unhinged stereo equipment
                                      pushing gusts of wind waves through the room, disturbing epic stillness,
inciting wicked rage that ricochets;
                                             fingers scrape my face,
                                             figures lose their shape as vision fades,
pain transforms to passion;
                             two broken hearts took each other captive.

I touch your chest.
Scraping your skin off with my fingernails,
Layer by layer.
Meticulously.

I reach in.
Slowly snapping the bones back,
Rib by rib.

I watch you breathe.

This is the part I love,
Feeling your heartbeat.
It keeps perfect time.
The blood gushing, it's poetic even.

I take my finger, slightly pressed to the beat.
You're gorgeous like this.
Under the smallest push of my finger.

This won't be clean.
I wrap my hand around the source of it all.
I twist, tug, and pull.    You love it.

I take you in the palm of my hand.
Still beating, still vibrant, so beautiful.

I bring you to my lips, and I kiss you one last time.
I swear I can taste you in between my teeth, raw still.
And this time you stain my lips red.

They just keep gnawing on my bones
They're glassy eyed they look like drons
With a persistent chewing grinding away
It goes on all night and day
Teeth scraping on bone the sounds unnerving
They think my bones they are deserving
They just keep gnawing, and bitting through
But this is nothing very new
Teeth on bone, crunch crunch, crunch
Gnawing on me again for lunch

angry men who do not know I do not have a dollar or a cig to spare. Ugly irrefutable contagion-handed howlers. Angry mischievous heathens that pantomime on 6:00a.m. sidewalk, Wicker Park gallow stop-sign, choreographed gutter-punk drunk walk. And of all he wants and could ever want splits down his gooey membrane brain in the outline of a noun shaped fragment of a clause, "Couldja spare 80¢ for the train," but of course I don't spare on the ellipsis or the period. Semi-colons I won't! My rubber-bottomed leather boots lash out, heavy scraping sounds trail this mirrored shadow half an angle behind me.

*****!! Blonde framed sunglasses from American Apparel, a gift from my sister in a folded Ray-Ban case is scattered on last nights bedroom floor, my girlfriend has certainly not noticed, the gloom-coated morning sun spray has not noticed; but I have unzipped a fissure in the ocular lens. My heart skips a beat. Her bedroom might as well have swallowed them whole. Now the house can halt and have the shade, swaying in Spring air in 10:22a.m. shadows. The aviator himself Howard Hughes would strike me with his 488 aircraft. Edwin Starr in his invincible sinister calypso of War would turn me round. I was sturdy as a rock until I began to forget my forgottens. These unknown unknowns I knew I needed. I'm over a quarter-century on to noon going nowhere- and quite blindly.

But then, still she could stand upright and find me. Her neck crooked, looking onward through the East, the gristly roots of rhubarb buried in her searching fingernails. She's threaded worse, and of course if I could just tell her- this is the kind of nursing which requires acute temperament and flexibility. I am thus on a journey to strike nonsense and fear from the idiotic vocabulary that put this nonsense in my head. Split through me like a butter knife into my apotropaic. Perhaps tar water could cure my ails. If not, certainly a sliver of vanilla would set me straight. Or if could just rain rain rain all day, then I'd make do without, but she is at school. My pistons are racked and nervous, and I'm not going anywhere but my rucksack stoop. I am camped in midwestern Spring soup. Fog, rain, and shade. The nightmare of day.