Straving on the fringes gorged and gored of that vibrating center  
Look at me but not that long, let me be a cog of the conversation, I can't start the wheels turning and god please don't turn me into rust, grinding words to a scream screeching halt

Salt on my tongue while I’m waiting for the gun.
Piecing together what little I have left to scream.
My coffee mocks me and the consistent coughing I expel just to try to say to her I have nothing left to tell.
There is no reason for explaining how she is pulling away from us.
There is nothing left to hold across this dingy diner table.

With something to lose in my back pocket,
I let her pull the trigger, keeping eye contact with her grinding, bearing teeth;
Lips a deep obsidian – as ominous as the cloak of Death -
Making her gums look more of a grey, watered-down pink.
No salty-sweet liquid smile spreads between those lips.
No more warming gesture left to give….

Deeply split:
Right through the skull.
I **** in air through my teeth.
Dead and shattered, I refuse the refill from the waiter.
I’ve got no stomach anyway.

She eats my brain, feasts on the memories, ripping them with her blood-black canines.
She tears my lips right off;
My face;
Giving me little room to say my piece.

I’m only now just starting to hate her.

Down her gullet goes my sight.
I’m blinded by the spit she threw into my eyes.

I really meant nothing to her anyway.

My body cripples under her steely knife talons.

I dream of Afterlife and what peace it has to offer:
A couch to myself.
Room and
Space and
Time.
No hidden, broken shards of her shoved into the crevices of my home.
Bare and
Abandoned.
Alone and
Undisturbed.

As I dream, her hands ravenously caress mine.
Luring her prey in, I see. Killing with saccharine kindness.

She still cares about me.
She hopes I can forgive her.
She still wishes for me to be there.

darling you just ate – no. ****. darling you just tore me into shreds.

She frowns.
Brow furrows.

Her blade finger nails drag away
leaving deep swelling, gashes on my hands.
Black nails.
Black lips.

I fleck the rust off my rage and it burns anew.
We have done this far too many times.

I never wanted to ******’ be here in the first place…. You brought me here. Remember that.

I need a ******’ cigarette. This coffee is *****.

She looks like she need a cigarette too.

She only smokes when I’m around, and since she’s trying to **** me off, she refuses my offer to dip outside to refresh our lungs with nicotine.

This diner air is still and
stale and
suffocating.

Hell, maybe I’ll die twice today. That would be something.

Her feet tap underneath us.
She is only waiting for me to say everything is alright.
That she is in the clear.
That I will just disappear from this very spot once she gets up to go.

Listen, I will gladly keep clear from your path, but do not, do not, keep breaking me to bits if it’s you who keeps needing me around. You want rid of me, you have to not need me. I have no control. It doesn’t work like that. I hardly think it’s fair th-



The old man in the corner slurping at his spoonful of soup, raised his eyes as he watch the lady in the dark cotton dress rush out of the dim-lit diner in a fuss. A swoosh of wind met her outside, causing her sleek, crimson scarf to almost catch in the closing door. He pitied the poor stranger. She had been sitting alone, looking frustrated and disoriented, speaking pleadingly into what he could only assume was a telephone headset. His wife had bought him one before he retired, but he barely ended up using it regardless. He felt it made him look to others as if he were talking to himself.

Dead man walking
Did you hear
The news? It’s shocking.
Chatter, chatter
In his ear.
Oh fear,
The fear.
Glassy dead stare
Dead stare
Dead
Dead man walking

Fake friends talking
Jarring words
Barely heard
What’s been said?
Oh pounding head!
Focus instead
On my wish to be dead
What a surprise!
His old man cries
His young man has died
Old eyes, young man
Young man
Man
Dead man walking

The truth comes out
Jaws dropping, eyes of fury.
Waiting, waiting,
What’s your hurry?
My life is over
In a flurry
So don’t worry
Just keep walking
Keep walking
Walking
Dead man walking

picking up the phone and dialing your number from memory
tapping on the beaming LED screen in my blackened and frigid room
it sends me into a lycanthropic frenzy
I shed the skin of a plagued, maddened hermit and
mutate into a gregarious, fluttery seraphim
when your “hello” melts through the receiver to greet me
it makes Annie Clark sound like a rattled wasp nest
when I pace around my room, telling you about my day
I feel like I’m weaving adventures together just to feel your warmth
through the phone pressed against my oily cheek
the clock whirlpools helplessly trying to figure out the time
as if it had got caught up in our banter and forgot about its job
but even if the clock can’t set the time straight, the sun does
when it creeps its ugly head above the horizon, I hear a mumble
then a quiet “go to bed” and a “goodnight”
and I shrivel back into the saddened lunatic I once was

“It’s time for bed,” was never a problem for me,
I was good at sleeping, I could do it longer than anyone else I knew and they
couldn’t wake me if they tried,
I was in over my ankles, waist, chest and head,
Five hundred pillows and a duvet that was heavy enough to suffocate all the
car horns in my mind,
I didn’t have to count the sheep so they sat there and ate grass,
Because I could pass with all the flying colours refracted in crystallised
dreams,
In the pitch black I won all the altercations against those demons that bite,
The narcoleptic warrior is champion of the night, the steady rise and fall of
her chest, the flutter of twitching lashes like spiders legs, arms drawn
tight around ******* and waist for protection against the ties that bind,
It’s a **** art,
But I didn’t realise my excellence was subjective,
For my parents it was the ****** in the night,
Fox screams that would send them running to my side, only to find a steady
heartbeat and lethargic child, head to the pillow and snoring,
For friends and family who came to stay, for them it was wide eyed, white
knuckled, lying awake and clutching the sheets as I cried and whimpered in
the next room,
Trauma spilling over catatonic lips in the most wretched of yelling, pulled
out in a long, choking strings of invisible nightmare,
For my sister, it was ‘*****’, ‘cow’, ‘****’ and all the other curses that
I kicked or hit her with in my minefield of a sleeping pattern,
Bible versus, bolt upright, head spinning 360 degrees,
Charon won’t let me pass because someone wasn’t kind enough to put a coin
in my mouth and now I’m walking a shore I won’t remember in the morning,
I don’t remember in the morning, I’ve been buried in sleep,
Not until I see them unshaven and weary at the table, and I know they’ve been
leaking electricity,
Is it possible to be good at something if no one thinks you are?
I was good at it, once,
In over my ankles, waist, chest and head,
Five hundred pillows and a duvet heavy enough to suffocate,
To suffocate my talent, I lie back and count to ten,
Sleep mask, sleep tablet, sleep therapy, I try not to let it happen again,
I keep the nightlight on now, the sun my only sleeping scar,
How can you be good at something if no one thinks you are?
I don’t think I’ll ever grow out of it, but I’ve stopped reaching for the
pin-****** of white light in those starry night skies,
And now, when I lay awake in my bed, I’m afraid to close my eyes