Oxymandias

Trigger Warning: Overdose, substance use, death

1. Anesthesia

Once a weary traveller,
leaping from coastline to coastline.
Mouth running like a shower faucet.
Acerbic phrases cascading between your lips.

Invasive body,
compressing everything.
Pungent fungus-filled sneakers seized the air
Until there was no room to breathe.

What are you wearing?
You placed your hand on my knee—
I played dead embarrassed he would see. But he was simmering water on the stove top.

I hoped it was in jest.
Ingest— the crushed blue & white powder poured all over the ornate bed tray with
pheasants scurrying across a field, pressed behind a glass slab.

2. Stomach ache

I hope he’s not dead.

You complained about the rain. You did not belong here.

That night— still life.
We called your name. We kicked you and screamed.

One, two, one two, one two – the pulses we attempted to give you.
Your body, swathed in a blanket covered in little soccer balls.

Empty hand where your eyes were.
A lifeless blue.
Abhorrent hue.

From the dispatches of your cradled frame
That made me sick to my stomach.

* * *

I stood at the back of the bar like a rogue wave— the room flooding with tears.
How did you know him?

That night— the unadulterated kiss of death.
My wrinkled forehead outgrew my doll-shaped mind.

I am leaving her behind.

In that room,
where once I was a child,
so many summer nights

Not quite like this one
Not quite like this one
Nto qutei ikel isht noe
Ton tuqie kiel shit eon
Ntolieklontsheotquie

3. Night screams

The whiskey sits on his breath, like an anxious wedding guest.
In glass pieces he lay.
Broken bottles— penetrating cuts into my styrofoam skin.

Sirens ring in my ears and I get seasick thinking of you.
The taste stuck on my tongue. Panicked notes unsung.

Now your ghost curls about the red house on the corner
and they hurled your ashes into the sea.

I am drowning in me.