extinguished

Maybe we should skip the pretext and get straight down to business. Trigger phrases inside trigger rooms. So many dawning shadows cutting the stage in half, and me, making up words at the tips of their toes. Bend down and kiss me in the rocket room. I've fixed the leak, but I've unscrewed the tap in the process. We have mere seconds to escape before we're caught in the flood, but I gargle as you drown, and tear my fingers into puppets. I run out of the burning theatre, and join an ambulatory mummers band that goes about cheering people up at funerals.

Business is very poorly.

But we straight-forward. Perserverence is the name of the game, and I've tattooed many names on the insides of my palms since I stopped being a child. You must remember names. They're the things we hung around each other's necks before. What came before? A slither-stir in the Garden of Eden. Bethesda's both a ship and a cemetery. Stay and go, all rolled up in the same slow-rotting timber.

I've grown wide wrapped around sailor's shoulders, like misbegotten mink. Russia, любовь моя. We come and go like stranger tides and promises of greener grass for faraway port girls, but also for no man. Trade is trade, and has been always, but we come to crush any who stand at our side. We are not good people. I'm taken off the shoulders and places snugly, lovingly in a casket underneath the floor when the fighting's about to start.

I never realized I was something to be preserved, always thought I'd instead just pickle and dye. A tendril in an old pizza box, and I soar before the mast collapses whole-heartedly. In flames. I moan guttural through the morning-crisp air, my song of grief for all my sailors I'll never get to bury.

Snap my own neck, turn to twigs before I morph again and turn back into a bird. Boys around me have grown into men, and I've forgotten how to greet them. How are you? fine. and none of it means a bloody thing. i'm a bird, the same bird i was at 16 when a strange man took my hand and i didn't know what to do with it, but also different.

i'm a tossed penny, with no luckless bum to look for me. it is not an easy fate, and i beak drop into the white underworld and wake where i started, but covered in sea. there are mountains, growing cancerous of snow covering my mouth and my two erect nipples. one of the left of me, one of the right. all lightless, as i've been for some time.

pasts i've been covetous of end up being not mine, so i shirk my uncovered shoulders and shun responsibility. i move on. transpire between two identical gossamer leaves, one glued to the left of my soul, one to the right. i'm moving across space and time, but there's still a third, yet-undiscovered dimension that i haven't learned how to access. that leaves me stuck here, switching gears, trading places with people who've got it worse than me, but seldom better.

how do i relieve the subtle aching in my lower back? was i meant for this gypsy pirate's life, always, or will there come a time when i crumble into a heap of joints and settle down?