Plant your roses facedown in the dirt,
let the stems offer only their teeth to the sun
a jagged greeting, curious bait for the passerby.
Let your gardens rot while you stand sentry,
barring the beetles, the birds, the butterflies;
all the small mercies that might make you stay.
–
Let the parasites inside freely,
throw them a banquet of your own salt and marrow,
freshly bleeding through the fissures in your veins
while your heart starves in the cellar
and your hunger eats you alive.
–
Keep the fort engaged. Let none tread through.
Beg the maggots to swim in the gut of your purpose.
Rip the wings from your own back
and hurl them at the jackals you swore were waiting —
those beasts who never even knew you existed.
–
Step into the blizzard and raise your palms.
Keep your hands half open. Always enough
to catch the frost, but never enough to hold.
Stare at the shards of ice that refuse to melt
against the blue of your lifeless skin;
the winter punishes you for leaking all your warmth
onto barren floors where no one walks.
–
Calculate your never-happening happenings.
Spend your minutes measuring the ghosts
of imagined lives and kindness you’ve forbidden.
Keep the cold.
You burn with no intention of rising from these ashes;
you are a fire that seeks only to be soot.
–
You are a shadow that peeled itself off the pavement,
shivering and masterless.
Stabbing yourself just to prove
that you still have blood to share.
Keep it as you wish,
masochist.