I lost my cigarettes today; they're stuck somewhere behind the passenger seat in a bright yellow taxi racing towards the future. I'm choking on the exhaust; on the ink-dipped fingers made up of verbs nails and metaphor bones. They are lodged in this bruised paper throat, jammed in deep, trying to kiss my ribs. I may be dangerously on the edge of being poetic, but I'm devouring chaos in an attempt to escape the sameness that is the past.
I wait on the corner of Forgotten Dreams Blvd. and Do-It-Yourself St. I wait for the yellow taxi to come back around to take me to my future. I wait for years. My bones are now dust; my wrists have been replaced with the sharp thorns of roses. I have been sutured together by artists devouring blasphemy- I have been hallowed out and spit back up.
My red-ink words tremble as I pretend I mean something to the ghosts who wreak havoc on my dusty bones- impaling these masochistic butterfly wings between heartbeats and bed-sheets, forever immortalized. My words, they are rough and callused with over use, their own faithless artists spewing black tar from their lungs in the hopes that one day they will breathe again. These words of mines are not poetry swimming liquid fire through ashes of dead phoenix veins, I promise.
I've waited for eternity on that corner and finally when my dust-bones are about to blow away, that yellow taxi from so long ago stops before me. "Need a lift?" The drivers raspy voice calls out in a New York-ish accent through the open window, a gaping toothless smile is shot at me. The door opens and I step inside the mildew smelling car. As my eyes adjust to the dark interior, I set my eyes upon a creature so lovely, a creature so pure.
As we race towards our future, I spit out jumbled words making no sense. She gapes at me and asks for more. I give her more; words that she says fly of midnight wings, words that not so long ago dragged me down. She swears every so often. I enjoy the way 'fuck' rolls off her tongue, as if she had invented its meaning. I try to articulate that one syllable, match her way of speech- She's never needed to dress up her words- dip them in ink or paint them in poetry upon the exotic map of my sun-kissed curves.
I have drowned so many times in the dark sea of her eyes that I am coughing up seaweed and weak bones. She tells me not to speak- that such words sound dirty on my tongue- that my spine is made for beauty and not for glut. I smile, laughing at that; "Silly Girl."
She sits hidden behind layers of paint. She is pretty. The paint she hides herself under angers me. Every day it is a new face a new her. I have had enough. I scrub the paint from her face. The process is long, but finally I see her; the real her. She is beautiful.
The bright yellow taxi is racing towards my future, I am not chocking on the exhaust this time. I am a passenger, with my future sitting beside me. I lost my cigarettes that day, but I find them now, nestled quietly between her fingers. I inhale her breath, smoke and oxygen. I smile, she speaks.
"Write of me," she says, "right here."- planting sun-stricken kisses along the hollow of my burning throat.
"I want to be where your heart sleeps."