bleeding ink throats

I'm forgetting how to pump these rotting thoughts through my grasping, skeletal fingertips. I'm a well run dry and the only thing left is the bucket at my feet, cracked and aging; blank, broken pages with nothing left to say. And all my body's wishing for is a way to spell the words that will write you back into my arms. Because you're a thousand miles and a million wishes away and I'm starting to believe I've just got no words left to say.

I am bleeding syllables and pulling phrases from between my teeth, but they're broken and empty. I know if I breathe my poisoned sorrow into your mouth, your lips will dry and your flesh will crack and the beauty of your wordless joy will turn vile with the hopelessness of my wordy existence. Perhaps we should live in silence and bury my words under the porch. Perhaps we should turn our cheeks to the strung-together sentences of my questions. Perhaps we should just run into muted existence and forget how with each separate vowel, I am digging up the past and pain in every way I can to drive letters into my bones. You moan the loss of your words, but I am living in the land of the vocal. I ache for the silence only your lips can bring.

The silence in the blackness behind my teeth isn't the soft fade to sleep it whispers, soothingly, to be. It is the void between stars, the shadowy hollows between walls, the emptiness of forgetting hope in your absence. The depths of these words are getting too thick and so my body screams for other waters: the eddies in graphite and ripples of sunken pages in aging books. But the rhythm of your letters is teaching me, alphabetically how to live and hope again after each catastrophe I stumble in, again and again. Speak to me from canvas and quill: I need your words, because I'm forgetting mine.

I fear if I rip open the seams and pour words from my silver throat, you will not find the hydration that you crave. Instead, you will choke on the fears and the doubts that permeate through every liquid drop. You will taste how I quell before the past and erode at the touch of the future, how I would anchor in the moment if you were here to pull me down. Oh, but if you want them, you can have them. If you want my words, you may take them. I will speak in riddles and tongues and maybe if I sing long enough, I will pull every poison taking residence in my bones so that you can see my demons for what they really are. Say naught a word and pull me close through time, hold me still as the words rip themselves like leeches from the backside of my flesh. I will bleed and jerk, an earthquake trembling between your palms, but hold me still. Your silent gravity has to be enough to keep the violence of my noise from tearing us apart.

Darling, let's play in other elements. We're building our house in sand and silt but we need something thicker to withstand these winds, these waves, these colliding storms that are pounding through our sandcastle doors. So take the wood from my hands and build with me a frame, to stand into the landlocked soil and wrap our walls around. Take the bracken and the clay from all around us and fill these walls to the brim, stack them with bricks to keep out the wolves, and most of all: we'll build them with love to keep out the demons we'll tear from our skin, and for all of the memories we want to keep in.

Take me from this place of stick and straw and let us lock our love in stone vaults like the precious commodity that it is. In the heart of construction, I will open myself to you so that you can take starfire from my breast and forge our home to withstand the teeth of time and cruel intentions of outside force. As you sculpt, I will find the fountain of poetry deep within the tangled root of our hearts and let it flourish where it is safe once more. So, take your strength from the shattered passion of my bones and build our home. I swear, with my final breath, I will fill the walls with the words you thought you lost. I will flood the floor with the novels of our eternal tale, so that when we wake once more we will be safe in the eternal skeleton of our jointed pulse.