poetryyyy - gunshot , go

Hell when he’s touching you and hell when he’s not. The town vultures watch you wander from the porch. Didn’t they know? Didn’t they tell you so? Girl, he was never any good. But they still won’t make eye contact with you in the store with their husbands and children and daughters, as if they’ve never loved something with the power to destroy and birthed his successors- a life sentence to a jukebox jingle. 

Red and thick and only $7 a bottle for the forgiveness of every sin ever imagined- it will warm and keep you, as God promised, as God failed, as the world looked upon the purple-blue-grey-red of your youth and turned away. It’s sour and burns and you must get your teeth fixed one day, since you lost the bottom right to an argument.

It’s disapproval all-round, a celebration of ‘not-me’s and ‘never-my-girl’ and your mother being right, always right, digging into you at the beginning like a serrated blade and twisting you farther away rather than closer. You never did figure out how to stop the bleeding, how to save the bank, how to collect and patch up the crimson. 

Dirty dirty dirty. Unclean and bruised. Good for nothing but roadkill, but dead, but soaking through your clothes and making a mess of it all. It was late and he wasn’t home and your things packed themselves and now you are so, so alone. You promised yourself to so many men and so many Gods and so many ideas of safety and personhood that never came and will never come there.

On Sunday, will they ask where you are? 

Will he even notice that you’re not there until tomorrow, when he needs his baby, his love, his angel, his punching bag? In the early morning sunshine with his headache and yours coming, will he notice? 

It’s a long walk to a new home and a long climb to a new mountain and it’s now or never, do or die, the watchful streetlights and the eye of your Protector and the stiff ladies on their swing chairs. It’s the suffocating late heat and the bugs and you;

Your dirty knees and your tangled hair and your bloodied lips and the tugging in your ribcage to run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run 

run run run run run run run run run run run run run ru nrunru n run run

runrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrunrun

runru n run nunr run