There's blood on your hands and you know it. You can taste it, seeping into your skin, flowing through your veins, spilling at your feet. You remember feeling clean, back before belts were dotting constellations across your flesh, before Lolita lips devoured yours in sticky summer kisses, when the word 'son' still seemed to fit around your heart. You want it all to fall away, to wash the blood off your body in sheets, dig the dirt from beneath your fingernails, shred your skin away by layers. You're dirty and calloused, with scars so deep they go to the bone. You can feel it etched upon every surface, angry scrawls, burdens like inky tattoos within your skin.

Blood spreads like disease, thick like molasses, surging into pores, your eyes, your mouth, and you can't breathe. You're drowning in the dead, dead red. It's splattered across concrete, brains and hair and open eyes and no more laughter. Cold and missing and lost at sea, it soaks through the walls as you try to sleep. Gone, gone faces and A negative on blue Mercedes and crimson dripping down the glass of a television screen.

It's all on your shoulders, all this death, these stiff fingers clawing and skeletons free-falling. The gun metal scrapes against your cheek, trigger ready. The knife slices, ground explodes, headlights approach, sky collides, glass crashes, ocean swallows, stranger touches, friend enters, life ends. They're your hands, your weapons, your sins. You're tainted and there's no turning back.

Fingerprints, loops and whorls and lifelines mark their way along everything you touch. She has it on every inch of her body, everywhere you've tried to claim; her lips, her hands, her breasts, the round of her thigh, her heart. She's marked in blood and doesn't even see it. She's marred forever and still presses her lips against your skin. Even as you hold her, your dark oceans push in and pull her away and you wonder why she couldn't smell the death all around you from the start.

There's blood on your hands and you'll always be the one to blame.