Atomograd

skin melting off his skull, you watched them peel away flesh bitter, brittle, broken flayed open, split apart, splinted back together put him under, intubate, we must not resuscitate. innoculus innoculations embrace his marrow-laced bones, plasma-laden blood so frail and volatile and oh, you, with your aching heart opiate-addicted to breaking, your love was just another foreign object

words not written to be read aloud whisper from the centrefolds your four-page four-star four-times best seller told me everything. press printed pages on scrap-cycled runoff murmur every recycled phrase, reused, rethought, repurposed ideals; in your originality you paint yourself a copycat killer, inspiration hung up to dry, salvaged from the graves of wordsmithing, worldbuilding ancestors you-- eight years ago you visited a grave. a tombstone with your name, smooth under rough fingers rough under smooth caresses, curious, mundane apathetic in your agony and oh, so average in your mourning. exhuming long lost media, cartoon storyboards devoured by time, decayed by circumstance animatronic servos, vhs tapes re-re-re-re-- recorded over [ a man falls seventy eight feet and a taunt steel cable breaks his fall. men he loved, men who loved him, will later wrestle in his blood. over the edge and over again, never to be destroyed, viewed or duplicated. in living colour, a woman loads

live in a house that makes you pantomime home in the liquid gaze of night live in a house cradled by skeletal hands, boney fingers shuttering windows - a house with no mouth filled to the brim with gnashing teeth live in a house you can't stand to breathe in, atmosphering air poisonous venomous to breathe in die in a home to be buried beneath floorboards split sideways by blossoms be lain to rest under the foundation, over the rocks, and watch with dry eyes the rain trickle down through the cracks in the floor live in a home whose name rhymes with grave and know yourself by the inscription on the doorplate above

you pluck harpsichord heartstrings right from my chest, mattress stitch them along heartlines on my palms lay your cheek in my grip and listen to my palpitation pulse, drag your tongue 'cross my hand and taste the staccato beat oozing from my connective tissues - bloody, coagulating - your touch envenoming suture my chest closed with my own sinews, and hope hope the wound closes again

please, i begged, doesn't anyone have a phone? i have to get my friend to the hospital, i wept, i sobbed over the corpse already gripped by rigor mortis it took hours to find her - found him on the side of the highway, had to roll him up the hill, he said she's a woman, i wanted to wail, please, take us to the emergency room but the mall shopkeep only tried to bind her curled fingers tighter with elastic hairties, she clasped her hands around mine, curled them around the fevered fingers of the cadaver we have to get her to the hospital

come home, return to me close the lid and bury me where once you did

bury me alive, alone, in a casket built for two [ it's like he's dead- ] bury me, heart beating, lungs breathing lay me to rest with a racing mind [ -but he's not- ] eyes filmy, blank blind in the dark without your light close the lid, close the lid. [ - i am, ] look upon me as i putrefy before your eyes liquefy, where i stand my strength recedes, tendons strain, snap too fatigued to walk, to crawl [ again. ]