The Crack

Before it got really bad, it was just that sometimes a color was off. The sky would be yellow, the water red, or people’s skin a shade of blue. It’s not like it bothered me, though. I think I just thought it was all normal.
I can’t really remember when it all started, though I think it was about three years ago. I would have been seventeen. That’s when things started to hurt, and I got scared. I could never really manage to tell reality and my dream world apart, for the two of them co-existed together as they slid over top of each other.
There were two visions I could never seem to get rid of, though. The others were just fleeting. The girl in the mirror, the blue boy who lived under the bed. You’d have a conversation, and then poof, they’d be gone. Those visions were all right. They were almost like a child’s fantasy, really.
The real problem was the angels.
I’d see angels everywhere. Some were branded onto my skin like a moving tattoo, never staying in one place. You know how books or pens just fall randomly and you think you’ve bumped them? I’d see angels pushing them off the table and laughing with happy voices.
One used to live in bowls, and one morning she rose above the cereal and said, “You’re damned.” That’s all the angels would say to me. You’re damned. I can still hear them in my sleep sometimes.
I used to see you with wings. I don’t know why. Probably because I was in love with you. I still am. I guess I saw those wings on you because that way, it would make sense for my feelings to not be returned. If I’m in love with an angel, it would make sense for you not to be in love with a human.
I can remember that day the visions got worse. I don’t want you to blame yourself. I don’t want you to fall into self-hatred. None of this was your fault. It’s nobody’s fault.
I remember I was waiting for the bus and you sat down beside me. I couldn’t tell the difference, I’d never had a hallucination of you before. Wings or flowers blooming on you, sure, but this was different. You were so solidly real. Even your voice sounded the same.
You said, “Hey Alex, do you know I love you?” in the same blunt manner as always. And seriously, it was like a dream come true. We’d been holding hands and then you got up, let go and walked directly into the oncoming semi.
That was the first time. I’ve seen you slit your wrists, I’ve seen you drowning, murdered, jumping, and always you’re saying you love me with your last gasping breath. It all just blends together.
I told you I don’t want you to blame or hate yourself. It’s not your fault this happened, or that I’m in love with you. You’re just my psychotic obsession, sweets. I just wish that you were in love with me. You already know all this, though.

An Alcoholic's Ballade

He couldn’t feel his hands anymore. He could see them as he watched them tremble, fingers closing around the half-empty wine glass, sloshing its sweetness over the sides and down to the floor.
Everyone was laughing for no reason. Feeling no pain. Crushed by their own dreams and wishes. So they had turned to an old lover to warm them up on the cold night of New Year’s Eve.
Everyone laughing for no reason, and he was about to join them.
He could taste her on his lips as a smile danced across his tongue. In his fantasies, she was wrapped around him like a snake, like a cat. Always purring softly in his ear. It was just enough to tip the balance.
He could remember when she’d shown up, just shortly after nine. Hand in hand with another man, smiling, she’d taken the room by storm.
He’d watched, vaguely interested, as she worked her way though the room with all subtlety of a burlesque show.
The man who had entered with her was the first to fall, and then down they all went. No concern about age, gender, or sexual orientation, for they were all lured by her warmth, her comfort, and the promise of something more to come, later in the bedroom.
Soon, she’d turned to him, and with the encouragement of his friends choking him by the neck, he’d given in to her.
Glass by glass was swallowed in the deliberate drunkenness of time, as she danced across the wreckage, stepping over bodies while singing tunes of death.
They were laughing, some dying, in a ritual older than the era.
He couldn’t feel his hands. In some part of his mind, he could still move, could touch her as she moved over him, gently undoing the buttons and the wrappings of a promise.
There were no bells to ring as the moments between the years dissolved. The sirens of contemporary time echoed thoughout the city, spinning out across the graves of those who would die that night, seduced and abandoned.
She’d left him there, alone, unsatisfied and wanting mores. Intoxicated with all the possibilities of a lifelong romance blooming though him.

Dark God

I will love you
in all the essence
of a dark god,
chest bare and breath shallow,
counting the gaps of your ribs,
an uneven earth in the garden
of your body, trapped beneath my fingers
as I raise my hands up the ridges
of your bones, trace
the soft curves of your lips,
the grin of a black smile
in your teeth, press my mouth
to yours and sigh
as you bite down,
hard, blood a vivid dribble
down the curve of my cheek
and a fresh stain across the front
of my shirt
until it reaches the axis
of my heart.
I have been waiting
for this and with every second
I can feel the pulse of the blood
beneath your skin,
the scream of your cells
and the gasp of your lungs
left crawling across my body
in punishment for what
I have done.
There is very little choice
in this matter,
so please, kiss me,
let me lay you back along the sheets
and begin my final descent
down with you.

Combust Part III: Sanctuary

I burn, I blaze wildly out of control. And I’d hoped, I’d hoped that the fire was your way of directing anger, hatred against me. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I’m still on fire, though, and in need of sanctuary.
I need, I need help, freedom in the water as the sea surges against my body, steam rising into the black air that cuts against me, kissing my lips as the wind tears by.
I need to extinguish the flames, soak my feelings dry until I can combust no more.
But still, I can’t make it, I can’t make it. It’s too hot, burning in the blaze, red ice as it all crawls up my arms, into my pores and enters the bloodstream.
Sit. Sit down before you collapse, before you disintegrate. I want the ocean, and it’s within sight, over the railing, past your barriers of fire. And I need it. I need it now. Yet I can’t move.
The bench is wooden, flammable and soft to the touch as the fire slowly spreads from my body, clothes, and mind.
I’m almost there, though. Just over the railing, one jump, one hoist over this barrier that’s keeping me from the sea.
I’m on fire as I fall.

Combust Part II: Ring of Fire

I jumped the ring of fire on Tuesday. It was a Tuesday because we had ham sandwiches for lunch, like we always do on Tuesday. The whipped and trod-upon lettuce mournfully added between the meat and the bread, no dressing, in an attempt to cheer the meal up. It never quite works, though.
But still, I know I’m not lying, not crazy, not mad even though none of you have ever listened to me. Not even during the dead of the black night, when the flames curl round my heart and squeeze, the room ablaze in red, orange, yellow, and gold as the fire is fanned and fed by the fuel of nightmares. I die and I scream of a death by fire, over and over, and yet you cannot hear. You’re deaf, you’re deaf. You’re always deaf to my screams.
So I jumped, scrambled, scaled the scalding chains that you’d attached to me while I wasn’t looking, blinded by the fire in the corner of my eyes. I now no longer wear the gasoline that coated each inch of my skin.
Because the flames were coming, coming strong, without warning, without cause, as they creep, crawl, singe my body to black ashes. I’m turning into black ashes, gray sand, white smoke and charred bones. 
I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, and you don’t listen, don’t listen to my pleas for help.
So I jumped and somehow managed to make it out of the blaze.

Combust Part I: Flammable Trigger

I’m still in heat, caught in fire as the flames dance, dance upon the edge of the skin, tracing my name as one of the mad, over and over until it leaves scars dug deep into the flesh.
You can’t read it, though. You can’t read those words in fire, smell the smoke rising from the sunken craters my body is becoming, taste the fire that haunts me through the night.
I can read between the lines, almost dancing around the sparks and ashes that flare up from the ground. You think I’m lying, you think I’m crazy, while I know that you’re the one who’s gone over. You wander the house after the lights are turned down. All residents are locked in their rooms to verify our safety at night. I can hear you, though, as you clink, clank, clunk around the kitchen, muttering as you go about damned children, stuck-up brats, and all the liars you have to deal with in order to make a living.
I’m not a liar, though. I’m not a liar and I can see the flames, taste the fire as it grows and grows and grows, crawling along the surface and the edges of my room, my body, my mind as it tries to kill me with one giant spectacle of combustion.

Red River Rising

I swallowed your essence as it slithered across the ground. Blooming wild in the hot rain, it coats the skin of this sad, sympathetic body in the singing of a tempest.
I'm used to thunder, though.
At night, the soft clouds would graze the spindled branches of the trees, seeping through the pale membranes surrounding the bark as if to break and spread the famine into the roots. Let’s eat away this soil, choking back the damp flesh of those who no longer carry flowers blooming across their skin and in their hair.
I don’t know where I’m going, though, as I sleep within the river, mud sucking me down in the form of passionate rape, damned embrace, and thunder as it cracks and booms above my head in victory. Your victory, as you crow overhead while I drink your heavenly poison, all-embracing as the iron silk strips my heart bare and squeezes, echoing wild agony to match the lightning careening across the dimness.
You’re not listening to the storm, though, as it rides across the sky, boiling purple, red, blue, and madness with struck lightning that scorches the earth, kisses the sun, and boils my heart whole in the grand soup pot that you claim to feed this earth with. A thick soup, a dark soup, filled with enough debris to build a drowning man a raft.
We’re still stuck in the river of your laughter, no roots to cling to. And I wonder, how you can be so blind as to not see the frogs as they struggle on the banks before the current floods them all away? But then, I never claimed that God was terribly observant.