There's a rip at the top of my skull, and with every kiss she mauls onto my forehead it grows bigger, ravaging my chest and my legs until my blood is just the color she likes.

There are too many things to say, so we settle on saying nothing at all. My flesh is torn apart, stringy and skeletal and it's lain over her dinner plate warm and burnt.

She rubs my back with ever increasing hostility, her fingernails grazing my skin dangerously slow, inflating me until I burst over her empty white canvas, (she'll hang me up all straight and nice and she'll show me to all her friends.)

And then when I burst, my mouth lands on the floor and we start laughing at the things that shouldn't be laughed at and at the worms gnawing at our feet when we stand and the naked man that is unconscious on our carpet.

We'll take turns drawing roses on his body and kissing his lips and biting at his cheeks, throwing him out the window and into the trunk of an old van that throws its gasoline out in huffs. Somewhere in our minds, he'll swirl like birds and scream like hyenas, and he'll stay and so will she, her bare chest and her naked sex and his chest and his lips and his clothes on our floor.

They don't belong together but they fit like sheared puzzle pieces forced into each other, and it makes me want to skin myself over the roofs and carve myself into his chest so that every time she loves him and every time she hates him all she'll think about is me and she won't ever be able to look away.

And so, the time passes like I had never found her in bed with another. Gentle whispers of resentment echo from spider to spider, from web to web, but too quiet for our ears to twist and turn, too quiet for us to look. We drove him a couple blocks away and left his unconscious body on a sidewalk, we laughed as we sped away in the film of old cameras and twisted rage.

We live like savages, eating at each other and digesting through needles and powdered puddles and sadistic cruelty. She began to take the needles to her arms more often, her skin blotched, (Rorschach, I see a butterfly.) Holes, windows into her body and into her flesh and visions of all the things that pass through her veins and seep into her mind. Holes and more holes from millimeters of metal and venom and sore tiredness that never goes away.

Her eyes sink into her face, nearly reaching the back of her skull and flattening, she can't see when she looks inside and she can hide from me and him and everything she murders because her eyes can open and still be in the darkness.

I still have dreams in my drunken hazes, but they're blurry and weird and nothing is right. Little gaps filled with static, I'm giving my liver to an alcoholic and I'm feeding myself to the bears.

As the weeks passed, our bodies stayed still, unmoving and sickening and bitter. We grew old and wrinkled, our faces sticky. We hadn't moved for a long while from our palace of caged lust. Hot skin rubbing together and falling apart at the touch, lightning coursing through the machines in our skulls and killing the hums of the fans and the messages of the wires.

She grew stagnant over the weeks, the flies buzzing around her head and nipping at her eyelashes. I would love her during her sleep, rocking my body onto hers, begging. Her nose bled when she collapsed from the corruption of her nerves, she would sleep for days and her chest would fall so slowly, she might have been dying. I watched silently, braiding her hair and playing with her cheeks. Her head was heavy on my lap, killed by the things that she wanted to kill.

She wakes sometimes, her voice slurred and coming from her ears. I look into her eyes and it hurts so much to see her eyes because I know that if her eyes weren't there I'd feel all of the hurt that is behind them unsheathed and it would kill me as if I got too close to the sun.
I don't mind watching her die.
But I mind watching her live.

Visceral, carnivorous, the shatter of plates on the ground and an awful wail, vitriol. The kitchen is loud and angry, so I turn over onto my side and sleep. Biting my tongue, swallowing it, the volume turned up high. She laughs beside me and kisses my fingertips before she disappears into the TV set and buzzes with the antennas, catching waves that crash into her ears. Vulgar eroticism, bent over with a bottle in her fears and in her feet.
Running into walls and running so slowly because there's drying concrete hardening on my ankles and something is chasing me and the footsteps are quiet and gentle and they pound in my lungs like tar.

I'm getting to this light that shines an overwhelmingly holy light over the teeth of the dark. I see her through the little tunnel, she's glowing as she once was when she was born, crying out from the womb and being placed in the hands of her killers. She doesn't belong there. She'd be beautiful if I dragged her down from her light and her step stool and brought her to the gloom of the floors. But I suppose it doesn't matter what I think right now, because she's floating farther away, far enough that my outstretched arm can't reach her throat. I watch her float like an untied balloon and crumble to dust on the ceilings, her ashes raining onto my forehead.

I wake to the death of the fall of her chest, an unnatural, manufactured still in the air.
I turn over on to my side and continue to dream. And when she never opens her eyes, maybe I'll start and end all the things I was too busy to because I was dreaming helplessly.