used to hold my head in my own loose grip, reciting ammonio methacrylate copolymer, hypromellose, lactose, magnesium stearate…
at night, when the candles in our room blew out and you wouldn’t let me relight them, when i stopped in the middle of the good part of every book i ever read, your fingers trailing down my sides in the half-sleep of the sin we shared together, the nights we sweat through relentlessly, the ache we felt insistently - i used to think, quietly - polyethylene glycol 400, povidone, sodium hydroxide, sorbic acid, stearyl alcohol…
and in the cold breath of morning, with the dewy coming of dawn, days after they have lowered you into the ground, after your mother has struggled silently to take in the fresh tracks dotting your arm, after your sister asks me loudly to look at what i’ve done, i sit with the last cigarette i will ever smoke, thinking - talc, titanium dioxide, and triacetin.
how good these words taste - all the chemicals i need to sleep away a memory, syllables as sweet as the drug they make up - as beautiful as the sound of my breaths, as painless as the shock of your passing, as gripping as the days without you, now; every one of them slow, and dark, and sad.
Anonymous
