Stumble

I meet you there and enjoy a few sweet minutes as we sit draped and entwined and I condense into, finally, a real person, concrete and heavy, and I bask in the luminous lucidity that has found me at last... but then you shove cheaply off and drag me away and up and out and down with you and everything that I am evaporates and my reality fades out like the words you wrote so lovingly in the sand when we were seagulls and danced in the razor-blade grass, not caring about the cuts ringing our calves or the bruises blooming aubergine and aquamarine on our bare sun-baked thighs. I ran away from you on a train in the darkness, and as we roared through the night I laughed to be so free of you, but I disembarked on a minefield hung with glittering spun-sugar lights and clouds of chlorine gas over a deceitful marsh of creme brulee and sofa cushions. You lied to me, to all of us, and then slowly slid your shining knife between my ribs, smiling sweetly all the time, and when you shower me with your false concern I will laugh in your face like the madman I am so surely becoming. You don't even notice, you just think I'm laughing at some stupid joke, or just for the thrill and the joy of being alive, you've never been able to tell when I hate you. Maybe you just think I'm as blind as you are, that I don't see your hands, enticing behind your back, as you stand far too close for innocence and lie with your smiling hopeful eyes at us for fear of losing the people you say you love the most. Pray to whatever you hold dear, darling, because every day you're pushing harder, testing the sinews that we've got tied around our swollen ankles, and they won't hold much longer, I'm warning you; your horrible mistakes, your greed, your complaints, your utter disregard for what anyine else wants or needs, your incredible, mindboggling inability to understand how anyone but yourself is feeling have set off an apocolyptic collection of alarms-- the flashing lights and air-raid wails have got everyone else hiding terrified underground, wrapped in itching blankets with their eyes tightly shut, but you don't notice a thing as you stand on your alabastor pedestal and tell yourself you are raining benevolance upon us, the unwashed masses, but we just shake our heads as we open our umbrellas against your acid, and slowly walk away from your philistine face turned in rapture toward the sun. I leap down and sail on a moth's painted wings across the blueberry sky to settle in your virtual arms even as they fade away and I am left to stare blankly at a cold and unresponding emptiness where I long to see your love flash before me so I can forgive my unresponsiveness and the way I faded away from your linked arms and onto the train in the night. I ramble rumblingly on as my head splits open and forces my body into the sleep of the terminally passive-agressive overthinking psychotic pansy.