Pieces

All the spoils of my youth for one coil.
All the spit, liquor, bong hits, all the sweetness of my laughter, all the cadence of my bright and cloudless eyes, back then, thick with mascara, all the lax joy of my upturned mouth, for one lever; glitch or no glitch. I had unerring faith in a flawed and godless system.
And looking at you then, strangely limber with your hands, telltale your veins, in that solar flare of hypersecond--while we changed stations, became leaner, leather, more appealing and more lethal. We sucked in our chests to make of ourselves gas masks, you drowned mid-cigarette; I knew I could never hit, could never switch, could never sever.

And I was in love with the glory of living flesh, and I was in love with being bad-eyed and loveless, and I was in love with the inhalation by bruised nostrils of cocaine and glitter, rubbed raw like childhood knees on chalky concrete, uneven, leveled sidewalk. I was startled by the magic of the night, the sudden leaping of my frozen heart like a bundle of jumpstarted nerves after an OD comatose from which one can return but never really revives, and parted, evil lips, crueler than cruel, wet with black, open-mouthed laughter.

I was intoxicated when we gulped for air, the dizzying combination of ozone and oxygen that flooded to the brain. The rustle of a miniskirt against thigh, with eyeliner delightfully smeared into the very arch of gleaming cheekbone, the way my curvature in and of itself became a latticework of scars and uncouth memories, a geometric form, the model of warped transparency.

I was ravenous, insatiable, without a love of cures or antidotes.
And now I cannot forget, cannot dismiss or erase, and now my tears are as bitter and uncommunicative as they ever were, and I wring my hands knowing that the future holds perhaps more happiness to lose. Another knife to twist, another unexpected turn in the immaculate maze.

I wonder how much I can bear. My head is wasted. I wonder how much I was strategized to take, how cunningly I was built to survive the wounds inflicted by multiple falls from grace.

I will never love again, not this much, no matter how it benefited me in "once upon a time", where the ticking of the clock was thrilling and incomprehensible madness, and still is. The air itself vibrates with the lurking monster of a future unknown, the gleaming teeth which both promise and deny my fate. I have become the filter of a cigarette, the filament of white line between blue bars, notebook paper. I am the vertebrae pulled so tight that you sit up straighter in your bed, tilt your neck back at an angle which is almost painful.

And I don't know how it came to this, no intensive speculation could bring me to this point, but it's never over, never over.

This is not me surrendering. Only remembering.
And I would have stayed like that, without food or sleep, suspended in the fluid of that lucid dream, preserved, smiling and immortal, covered over with icy sweat like a cool, strangely arousing pollen, with pores and orifices prickling, with only the most vague and beautiful sensation of awareness spinning through my delta waves forever, if only they'd have let me.

Those cruel, cruel souls I loved so much.

I will never love again, no, not this much.

Chase Allen