CW: mentions of suicide, blood, death
i fight my ex-boyfriend, the pillowman (conversing with The Pillowman by Martin Mcdonagh)
passing stalagmite, like kidney stones dust-drunk in the catacombs,
hangs the pillowman wilting delirious in his flesh house, cave dwellers
conjure necrosis in allegory, them vomiting the orchestral; shadow-side.
ambien damned as clover rot breeds maggots under grandfather clock,
an asphyxiation for that one big sin too soon, intra-trolley track on track,
and limp for the swallowing of damp candles, he watches himself burn.
no sulfur or vaselined temple confined here, no altar for the crypt keeper,
removing heads from ovens and pills from throats and necks from ropes,
thankless definitive no less infinitive for pallbearers across phantom realms.
the pillowman and I have a conversation before we run out of comets.
so I’m wondering do they discount child coffins? smaller urns? less body
to embalm? licking lighters for the theatre of it all as the cardiac care comes.
I interview him in fossils, hold the melting microphone fighting to be glass,
I ask, Has your kingdom come? and he answers, fickle and unfriendly
as he covets a wooden cross amber-stuck with thick paint and razor blades.
made to feel safe before feeling alone, he recites to crucify his confession.
why not wicker basket full of bread? special rose? magic dresses? true love?
he offers me a cup of bile as I clothespin my nose shut-hung in the interim.
he told me that life in the lackadaisical leaves us without the primmed props,
tea needed in the kitschy kitchen sinking up ticks and finches to ward off
the gas by the lantern light and the portrait of the undercarriaged cliffside.
feral fall the fetal fatalistic hitting intrinsic to the marrowed bone sin sinew,
and what do you do? you stop and stare and stick until the branches break.
leaving behind the fighters and freelancers to enhance your selfish song.
you tangled canaries to brave the opiate ownership of your own under
standing less than still, watered minus ground to earn the mosquito crown.
how dare you lay claim to maiming beyond mediocrity, far more violent.
some bastardized bard beyond comprehension fighting for attention, lest
the jester fix a turnpike to nix the choices of the proletariat at dusk to dust.
and who are you to criticize? who am I? lining flies along the windowsills.
I’ll tell you who I am, my seminal semiotics fuck my semantics into gossamer.
and wouldn’t you love to know what that feels like, resting relentless through
star-sediment, locking fevered doors against the aging current’s currency.
Hold on, he says. Hold on. My mythos is no meek cherry-sucking pinstripe,
though I hardly believe the makeshift masculinity curdling in the corduroy.
Crater-pained, he argues his madness away, shooting bullets into bandages.
love me, incapable intimacy drilling heartstrings through knuckle-clutched
pursuit of the wandering, swallows ichor left effervescent beyond poppy
clocks serial without surrender, ocular even without hands to hold him off.
creep that choreographed ivy crawling towards her privatized catastrophe,
then maybe you’ll understand. I said maybe. once I splint fractured spirit
with flowers stolen from the hopeless graveyard of fictitious independence.
I cannot be your muse, mistaken for a fixation irreparable as real people.
You can never know who I am, though you prey for what you think is prayer,
teething pipelines to wedding rings tied to trees, barking your infidelity.
how do you own without drowning? etymological etchings along corpus callosum
shrivel through your myelinated meandering. because you do not own. but
what will make you stop trying? if only serendipity predated your predation.
my diatribe is my transcendental resplendence, so that I may rest when done.
insistent on the heavenly ones, how do you wear your winter wares so weary,
biting through eerie boulevards shielding sunset from the undeserving service.
please, charm me with your understanding of courtship,
when you bleed aphoristic, the honey clogs the throat until you breathe bees;
arterial deceit made no less immoral with a claim to what, if only, you knew.
so, I’ll transform princess pretext to celluloid hedonist in the glow projects,
pronouncing harm like warm in the hopes that they don’t notice a difference,
between the two, between too’s and to-do’s, that lace glovelet perspiring,
pickled persimmon turned cheek dust, turned skin flow, sweltered swelling
in that hickory attitude of magnanimous anonymity antiquated beyond soul.
Martyr of the microcosm, that thorned lozenge wet with disbelief waxes,
stilted moon beyond reckoning, fear trailing corners and sycamore trees.
what is it all for, mr. man? your pillowtalk idolatry means nearly nothing
to me, you only know eros in arrows, gutted splinters triangulating red.
searing seers beyond truth until the pity party becomes a table for two.
you’re a saccharine has-been trash compactored beyond ghosts and use.
a sycophant of relentless apparition appropriating a projected woe-is-me
until seeds become seeds, all grit and no light as the monday moths float by.
I’ll sew your organs into garlands for the dead pagans walking the alleys.
what do you know of screens when your eyes are full of dirt, you have that
spit-shined belittling-type-face beyond press, prints, silk, and selkie skins.
Solstice boys lie to relinquish their languishing valentines
happy to believe themselves as sadists to the summertime.
And if they die,
the sun still rises,
bruises and rage
are the multipliers.
I bring the scythe to the stage to watch you decompose.
Festival for HORROR 