don’t call it love

revoke my name, i am carnage. shadow puppet girl, iced out of her own flesh. paraded as image, hidden as soul-tie. bound & quartered, dragged behind the starving hypothesis. what happens in the nightstand, stays in the nightstand. unfurled fist, rebundled round throat. shock absorption, radio silence. left for dead, still breathing. & for what? broken glass & razor blades shoved up & under the hip fat. you can’t suck out the venom, they lied to you. it races through your blood stream, straight to organ failure & rock salt. unnaturally pink or too natural, too meaty & carnivorous under the violence of uv rapture. the flies don’t call it love, the pull to the decaying—the decadence of vulturic scavenging. where all but whispers die in the vocal chords, most ordinarily inhaled through intestinal fumes. entrails laden in fleece-lined mold, rotting from juncture of heaven & hell. all the demons were once angels, too, darling, this is nothing new. just more human, inhumane, sequentially logical & equivocal. what it does to your stomach acid is just the default of composted corpse still walking among the living like warm milk can still put your mind at ease enough to sleep. it’s never met with disbelief other than in the ruptured core of volcanic heart. eruption too dormant in the ash, destruction too comatose to rise from the lips. all there ever was was cruelty dressed in wool, too soft to be perceived in its volatility. hindsight 20/20, but still failed the vision test. objects in mirror may be closer than they appear & they already appear so very close, like entrapment, like engulfment. astrological or astronomical or chaotic residual reckonings all abysmal & fluorescent. the cosmos erased themselves trying to breed you out of existence but you remain in blackhole-shrouded ethereal silhouette. the dagger not keen enough to cut you from the fabric of time or memory. what takes root must one day bloom again even if neglected, ignored, deprived from existence. biological warfare in the brownstone backdrop, firing on all fronts from vile to syringe. what can resuscitate the barn owl after suffocation? what can resurrect the prey’s cadaver?