Cancer.

I can see the cancer flowing through her veins
I watch as it pulsates with her heartbeat and dances to a rhythm
It’s dawdling poisonous venom slowly filling up her insides
I can’t see it but I can surely feel it.
Thread veins and all; the venom spreads through my lover’s lifelines
It races and runs under her greying transparent delicate skin
It croaks and croons under her fragile bones.
My fingers make a pattern perfectly between each of her fragile ribs
She takes another cigarette to her broken lips and takes an elongated intoxication; violent and rigid.
I kiss her rough mouth hard with my virgin lips
She tastes of smoke and gin and everything between.
Her eyes glisten green shining in front of the bedside lamp
Love was absent the night we fondled in her father’s bed.
It was anywhere but there. Does love go on vacation?
I ponder and make fleshy butterflies from my outstretched fingers. Probably.
She falls asleep and I fall in thought.
Isn’t it curious how your fingers fit perfectly between each of my emaciated ribs?
Or how your breath mimics mine with delayed accuracy?
I write awkward childish poetry in my head.
Her mousy hair falls across the nape of her neck resembling a bridge.
A beautiful marvellous bridge that people come to visit from afar with diamonds and rubies and encrusted wholly with love.
I hate the way you make me love you.
I’m not scared of ghosts or the dark nothing but the moment you leave.
All that will be left of me is a never-ending gaping hole of earth and lust searching for a tender warm mother’s breast.
Sometimes I think you’re just a mess of badly drawn lines.
You’re just scrawled veins beneath paper rough skin
You wear poorly sketched scars on your thighs; skin deep red pen lines.
Even your smile is lop-sided- but I never seem to notice.
Your skin, spread like thick icing over your skeleton, is a repetitive pattern of pores
A stretch of the world the sun never kissed.
You can’t see the beauty in multitudes of freckles and chipped fingernails- but I do.
I watch as your eyes make their way around the back of your head, searching for peace.
I hold you; inhale like you are a sample of expensive designer perfume.
I watch as my lover lies bare, soulless in my colourless remote freckled arms
I cast my mind back and recall all the moments you comprised of that ultimately led to this.
one.