Eyes of Fire

snake in your throat

There they are

hanging in the space
between you and me
like neon signs, flashing
police lights and siren screams
choking the air from my lungs

they are the words
I’ve known for a long time but
half expected to never hear

I look at your face
filled with stupidity and arrogance
and reach out to enfold my small fingers
around those words of black pain
to stuff the loud
blinking screaming hurt back
where they came from

they crawl into your jugular
and wrap around your larynx
squeezing it
a boa constrictor
the same way your words
suffocated the flesh of my hope
until it was drained
gagging, and left dusty and grey

I watch as these words of your making
are soaked into the depths of your lungs
moving through your aveoli and
absorbed into your blood
so that you can feel the toxicity of your
selfishness seep through
every part of your body
the same way that it seeped into
my every pain receptor, every blood cell

I want you to know the feeling
of how your sated poison
traveled throughout my body
so it will always remind you of
the words that came out of your mouth
sliding and heavy, like a snake in old mud
and that they in fact choked you, bit you, killed you
this fever of your petulance
that hissed at me with a languid tongue,
this manufactured idea that you
somehow ‘deserved’ me without effort,
had ‘earned’ and ‘possessed’ me like
a purchased piece of art that you never
quite understood so you hid it away
locked, wilting, gathering dust
from loneliness and neglect
and kept it just so you could
say you owned it

darling, do you feel that flavor of
metal in your mouth?
can you taste the weight of the iron
as it soaks through your taste buds
and sits fully on the top of your palette?
This pungency is the taste
of my blood
exiting your world
and the quintessence of your existence
being purged from my heart,
like a fever pushing out a sickness
where the only remnants are the
exiled drops of death
left on your tongue, lingering,
to always remind you that

I was the prey that got away.