the masochist
by R.R.S. i could list all the ways i love you in elizabethan drama and victorian poetry. or maybe i could label all your tortures in archaic philosophy, siding with plato because he echoes through the leafed - in columns of my classical skull. but who's to say that an obsolete biology term isn't the best: because it's not. i was an angel once, but now commas cuff me to bedposts and i don't trust you from behind these dash-mark blindfolds. i can feel your teeth sink into my parchment skin, the kind i wear as a birdcage that i want to be filled with jellyfish. i saw you only briefly, love: and i crumbled into the dust mote sunbeams. you were hemingway and longfellow slicked in calligraphy and pastels, maybe with cursive curling at the corners of your eyes. you had bone ulcers and the acid in your body was distorting your face. my blue veins stood: isolated. begging, pleading, popping. paranoia burning violet in my blood, hollow as the spaces between my eyelids. ravaging your empty pyres, eating away at your allegoric control. dismantling foreshadowing. it was supposed to go down with a un-raveled novel-spine rushing down my throat, but all i felt was silk sheets pressed against my sweating face. i thought your lips were dripping with poetry, but i soon found you to be a jack of many trades--strobe lights are always confusing anyways. irony licks the latex powder from my sweating hands, and covers them in gloves. i can feel its eyes upon me, and you are still there, feeling compelled to crush my fractured grace, tasting blood and saliva cocktails. your teeth crimp my muscles like folded papers and little torn dolls, tightening make-up dripping off our painted faces. one cracked high-heeled boot at a time. 'kill me, love, but do it romantically.' |
craft chains smile dull colors, and unfurling ribbons find their way onto my lips. i ask you if i'm dreaming, because i never thought someone could bleed ink. you can taste my saltless tears that stain every empty manila folders; clawing and never belonging to me anyways. i ask you to hold my hand and break every finger, because i know they don't fit in-between anyways. instead, you take your inkpots and leave purple crocuses across my wedding-dress skin. you drag your nails and quills across my limpid flesh, digging them until they slip beneath nerves and rake bones. crushing fountain pens between your teeth. i find sanctuary within the feeling of nerves ripping, cocooned in the skin that you helped me shed. a drip-drying name, warped in water because she wrote 'sadist' in a lighter shade of chalk. a pale dead-alive. rose-skin and razorblades glittering a harlequin's coat of colors, and asking the blankets if i'm fine again. 'masochist' was always a harder word to write. you slip these parentheses under my skin and shoot ink through my veins. i let 's's and 'r's slip down my tongue, conforming to the folds and creases of my cut-and-sliced throat. i breathe in the brackets and let the allegories fill my lungs and swell in my chest. i guess i'm ignorant of what real art is, because when i read your eyes, i start to cry. please, consume every pen-stained breath, and press your hand against my throat, violets blooming over my jugular. hold me too tight; fragile. crack me to the marrow, grind my hipbones to dust. drain my blood. rupture my heart. fist-fulls of paper. condor quills. 'again.' and i'll reach out when i'm the last beautiful thing on earth, and i can't avoid the boney crevices that fill my skull. because pain always finds away, and my heart was engorged itself. dislocated with the sick sound of breaking pelvises. paper is the only thing burning at the base of the bed, and 'more' is cut into the mattress. old sheets. dried ink. |
Subsequent topography:
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Slideshow artworks by Savannah Ficta
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