Act 1: Reckoning
Vinyl burns February skin.
A sticky valentine.
Handprint heat echoes
on cracked windows.
Your breath--
half prayer,
half epitaph.
Demons of the night
Dressed like angels,
Carving forever
with our canines,
swallowing it—
still bloody.
still warm.
Backseat furnace:
melting in salt,
lying in tongues,
drowning in dreams
plagued by hunger.
You saw me
through Spirits and Crown.
I crowned you
with kaleidoscope glass--
poison and bad luck
refracted
through your skull.
We wore them
like martyrs.
Those nights—
my secrets seeping
through the floorboards,
pooling in the basement
of our house of sand.
The way you learned
to taste lies
on my tongue,
to hear the real hunger
eating through my
hollow ribs
while I kept feeding you
crumbs,
hoping you wouldn't notice.
Murder by starvation.
Until the day you spoke
with the voice
of someone
who'd already
left.
Your eyes
steady as a scalpel.
My hands
still reaching
for a ghost.
Act 2: Aftermath
Morning.
Ashtray sun.
The world yawns
through slatted blinds.
Paint peels.
Blood dries.
Love leaves tracks
in the dust.
Your hair
still in my fists.
Oil-black.
Heavy.
You're gone.
I'm
still here.
Like seeing the ghost
was worse
than the wound.
The worms know.
They rise
fat and blind
to kiss the air.
We were soft souls
in hard bodies—
Too young,
too desperate,
too scared to name
what we were.
​​I try to bury it.
With hands.
With work.
With fire.
Still it comes back.
The stink.
The twitch.
The hunger.
I see you sometimes—
in shadows,
in mirrors,
in strangers' faces.
Graves
are not as deep
as people think.
There's always
a little skin
above the soil.
Something knocks
and knocks
and keeps on knocking—
a tell-tale valentine.
And I read it
every time.
The raven waits.
His sermon is simple:
Bones don't weep.
They whisper.

Decomposing.

Slowly.
Hush.
Listen.
Murder by memory.