Pulse-in-Throat

    There's the smell of rain on concrete and a girl ever so gracefully prowling the sidewalks. She knows what she's doing; she's got me in her crosshairs like a Vietnamese sniper just waiting to blow me away. I want to say something, maybe talk her out of shooting through my aperture; taking away my flow control. The triggers pulled and she doesn't even see my lens shatter, she doesn't see my star-struck face as I'm bathed in scalding light; retreating beneath sun-burnt skin, to a body not-entirely whole. A body, a heart in atrophy, an icy ring of ribs holding back a storm of flusters from a broken muscle. They say the souls in the eyes; hers just pull me down like quick sand. How I wish she'd crawl on-top of me and sink with me, but this time I'm sinking alone. I can't feel my own hands reaching but I know they're doing it, because I can feel that ice cold wind turn my fingers black.

    She's like a sun made of liquid nitrogen, touch the surface and risk shattering my body. Stay away and the light focused through her icy gaze is enough to set me aflame with vulnerable intentions. The fact this pathetic passing thought can affect me so drastically shows great weakness in an otherwise battle-scarred living carcass. The body is a husk and life makes calluses, the body is the witch and the skin is the heretic. She's burning me like a beautiful moth caught in a blow-torch and at the same time, she's freezing me solid so I stand in a torpid stupor as she passes by. I can feel the ropes and tendons snapping, my heart rising like a hot air balloon into my throat and suddenly… the boy that never stopped talking is as silent as a monk during the solstice. Suddenly, my phantom limbs are frostbitten and broken and only my Nitrogen-Star can warm me. Lost in a vacuum of desires quietly caged by broken hands, like a locust chewing out of a corn-stalk cage…it's only a matter of time until a swarm comes down and tears away my husk.