come closer, my friend and skate your fingers across this

cool steel, so smooth and deadly and yet so disengaging.

on one side, beautiful just like your honest glass whispers that i

never want to be without. on the other, revolting just like your

store-bought adhesive smiles. a spoonful salvation decays,

collecting dust underneath my bed, abandoned just as are

the empty spider webs that stretch across the damp corners

of my tired eyes. i want to trace your wrists with shards of mirrors

while i wrap your grace in dead skin and your lover's hair,

preserving your insecurities in jars on my withered

shelves. i am the rattle made from the bones of your children

that soothes your boredom and lulls you gently to sleep.

i am rotten like the metal edge you hide beneath

your laughter. a frame by frame walkthrough of my crisp collapse

carefully tacked onto your bedroom walls. i hope you wake up

each morning to a ceiling of torment. i want you to know

how i feel when i look into the jagged glass and reflected

back at me is the uneven face of someone i once knew.

my tears leave track marks down my brittle, lacerated arms,

cracking apart these plastic hands, and all that matters now...

well, it just won't matter pretty soon. do you ever gaze down at

a flickering flame and be afraid that it shall outlive me as the world

unexpectedly becomes smaller? o' exalted renaissance bride,

i wish to be yours. i have collapsed into myself, into a tangled

distraction, and all i have tonight is you, the one who i fear

the most, the one who's face i want to put a gun to because

i love him so much. don't let me live this life. buy me an epitaph,

put to death the queen of redundant drama, and tiptoe across

the godly geography of my body as you carefully memorize

the landmarks that are my harrowing scars, the only reminder

of my conflict lying beneath the soil-caked soft cotton

threads of my fingernails: the cement to pave my road to

the absolute, to the only thing eternal...

besides you and i, of course.