You carved God out of your chest and every second since you’ve been looking for something to bless the empty cavity. Obvious angel with your bloody wing-stubs, you stick to the classics sculpting flesh like clay into caricature. Sexmoneydrugs–ever heard of it? He’s got no name but you hadn’t come out looking for one. This is a matter of sanctifying the body in a comfortable sin. Here, in the park or his unlocked car, the anonymous subsumes all sense of self; could be anyone making your mistakes and anyone getting hurt.
God can’t see you here.
Hide from me in bathrooms. Sink into a fat chair that cradles. Tell your friends what you’ve done and commit their angry empathy to memory. Doubt anything could ever love you, not like me like me like the wet grin I dredge from my suppression. This is sweetness, this is heaven.
I’m learning to consider myself for the first time. Like a baby, innocent and defiled. Stumbled from the grass like an angel fallen sideways. I’m the named thing you gutted. I’m the empty shape of you. No amount of self-actualization or bowing before clever fungus can decimate your capacity for carelessness and no amount of tenderized hurt can make me feel guilty for my care.
While you’re on the constant search for something new to idolize, I’ll worship anything that lets me fall at its feet. Kiss you kiss you kiss you, I don’t know how else to explain that I am devoted to your touch because I must beg for it. Don’t give me what I want, I’ll only ask for more.
I can still taste your lips not yielding to mine. If you’d let my tongue crawl into your mouth, would I have felt the hollow place? The glacial freeze crawling up your throat? With all that flesh strapped tight to your bones, it’s a miracle you’re able to hold yourself up on shoddy morals alone. There’s no room for me in there. I’m a blessing you can’t stomach.
My anger is righteous and still I can’t spin it into hate. I’ve tried and I’m still trying to loathe you the way you loathe yourself. Can’t make it stick when I’m stuck to the other side of the coin, knowing you only by proximity. Feel you press up against me–inseparable, suffocating, egregious: my kind of eroticism.
Cutting you out like dislocating my heart. Why must I become a cavity to stop loving you? I’ve been tired my whole life and I’m left no place to rest my emptied head. Nothing to worship but myself and I cannot pray to a God on its knees.
I can look Him in the eye then. I can kiss Him then. I can ask Him forgiveness then.
I’ll get what I’ve been asking for then and I’m afraid I’ll have to cut it back out. The scorned know no mercy greater than the mercy we refuse to give ourselves.
jw
Very - visceral. Deep in its brutality, I found myself nodding mindlessly with a shudder up my back. An enthralling read. Thank you for your story.
“The scorned know no mercy greater than the mercy we refuse to give ourselves.”. Absolutely love this line! Poignant writing.