put your hands around my neck and i will call you darling with a knife behind my back

cardigan. 08/21/21

tw: death, morbid imagery, implied murder, heavy themes

your favorite place to kiss me was my eyelids. they were heavy, you said, calm and slow and warm, the only steady place for your butterfly of a mouth. it felt something like death when you landed, the prickle of a thousand dreams overlapping the sting of as many nightmares.

you cleaned the blood out from beneath my nails after my every sacrifice, when i came stumbling home from the altar at your feet. i really should have wondered when you told me how sweet it tasted between your teeth.

i used to think you looked like an angel with those bluefire eyes, cheeks in high color, you were crystal pink sunrise and higher than heaven’s light.

you’re a miracle, risen from your tomb of shadows, enough stars in your hair to blind the night sky. we’re intertwined, you fed me pomegranates under our favorite tree and summer was sweeter than the juice on our chins.

i nailed a halo to your head and called you saint, strangled you with holy robes and weighed you down with my sins until they came spilling black and thick from your tongue. you said i tasted like gold and summer, and now i know what that metallic tang must have been. you bit my tongue so many times.

you’re so beautiful, it makes me sick to my stomach and i can’t breathe without my hands around your pretty neck. it takes me a while to realize i’m dreaming, and i can’t meet your eyes when your morning smile splits my soul in seven. your only flaw is your perfection and i hate you i hate you i hate you - i press my fingers to your wounds just to hear you scream but i am the one who cleans and bandages you at the end of the day.

you terrify me in the way your every word builds a step to your throne and i am the one with the phantom hammer. you do not deserve your crown, yet i spend days in the fire to weld it to perfection for your head. all the while, i am imagining your skull on a spike, but your bones are just as soft to the touch and taste so sweet on my charred lips.

school made me despise shakespeare, but he came back to haunt me through my fingers on your skin and your knife at my throat :

“murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke”

—and i am already on fire. i tell myself i won’t kiss you again until you’re cold but searing heat is just the same, isn’t it? and that’s what i tell myself, giving into temptation quicker than eve.

i can’t resist the way you love me, especially when you don’t. i refuse your claims of being mortal, i’ve lived too many times to have known you only once. we’ve got teeth bared like hellhounds and revenge streaks like gods, but you were always the better one. when did love become a competition on cruelty?

a pretty boy smile and your hands in your hair were just enough to turn my fears to smoke and replace my tears with your heart in my hand and it’s not enough, it’s not enough to take the edge off your sunlight, your bright fire searing my eyes until you’re all i’ll ever see again.

i can’t take this anymore, you’re too loud for my silence and too painful for this incessant headache. you drive the voices at my shoulders to insanity and i am left with nothing. how did you do it? how did you drive out my demons and send my scars to hell? i’m on my knees now, begging for an explanation for something impossible and your smile is more wicked than i’ve seen.

no one has stayed for this long and i see you wiping my dust off your feet and brushing my problems off your shirt.

“murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke”

it’s time to make you a martyr, twist you into the saint i saw you as and show them who the villain was. because you never let me win at anything, at least let me win at being worse than you, the villain you tried to convince me you were. i always knew loving broke things, but i never thought it would be me.

i know you’ll haunt me in my afterlife, so i don’t plan on dying soon. i still keep your ghost in my bed, because it’s all i have left. i see your face in the shapes of the clouds now, it’s kinder than i . and i still find myself crawling to your altar, to the grave that’s still yours after all this time. whether to find forgiveness or to plead for your apology, i don’t know.

your favorite place to kiss me was my eyelids. because when they were closed, you could imagine i was dead and you were the last love i ever saw. my end was what kept you going and made me worship you.

you cleaned the blood out from beneath my nails after my every sacrifice. i guess i don’t it was your knife in my hands, your voice in my head and my own blood on my hands.

i used to think you looked like an angel but with those eyes, i think seraphim is closer. you flicker and twist, sometimes i wake up and you look like the sunrise, and others, i swear you’re the devil himself. sometimes you’re both.

you’re a miracle, raised from the dead end of my youth, with a five-point warning label but enough light to keep me in the dark. you wrapped me around your finger and fed me your forbidden fruit before i realized i wasn’t the snake.

i still despise the sight of you, it reminds me of the bruises on my neck and yours, our version of wedding rings, dooming us to eternal matrimony, with not even death to do us part. but i love the way you hurt me, how you bit into my heart as if it wasn’t poisonous.

i still love the sight of you, shining golden as holy fire, so meet me in the garden and i’ll love you like a prayer again. i wait for you there, even though you’ve been gone forever now. so come find me in the next realm and i’ll worship you the same, on my knees and in love with our destruction.