between

**

writhing in the familiar forever of a soaring blackout. that moment in the middle of  inebriation where the next  swallow means first tenderly tracing the neck of the bottle. the exposition of oblivion is itself the climax of bladdered grief. waving forgeries brimming with chattering words. falling for his parables though she had always known the gospels had been ghostwritten. 

her portable slander circulating cold allegories that wear off quickly. breathing in the madhouse tension where cleanliness solves most problems while tastes keep changing yet gambling on the odds of imminent offspring never goes out of fashion. everyone covets a taste of eternity but no one wants to bargain with the devil in their twenties anymore. they’d rather just hang out and mooch off his unpredictable lassitude. the volumes write themselves when all one has experienced is an embryonic nip of suffering. and so the old verbs and dangerous adjectives linger on.

her desire was an abstract expression of tampered merchandise. dangerous forces compelling her to chase landscapes only lovers would dare occupy. she was a young vine and not yet ready to bear the kind of fruit the vintner would find useful. thus the simplest words would have to do when translating accents without the use of individual letters. her faith in Newton waned every time he held her. love has its own laws pertaining to gravity and inertia. 

there is the preening rush of ideas. mention the desert and reap the tides. it is a dirty little business being so attractive. though the windows were well off the ground and though in daylight she had looked across the clearing and only seen a crush of trees, she pulled the curtains closed. and still she felt that eyes were somehow peering into the room watching her every sozzled pirouette. she had once cherished the thought that her oceans of love could sway him, but it turned out indeed he was the moon and even from improbable distances had managed to keep her at low tide while never quite turning away. 

when his eyes seemed to suddenly become diamonds was her first moment of clarity, when she realized the drinks he kept pouring were turning her tongue to ash and amplifying her thirst, a lull that comes when sobriety gives way to invisible delusions betrayed only by dumbstruck giggling. those first fleeting glimpses of truth that line the rim of sobriety are the ghosts that haunt later when the famished bedsheets try to swallow you in one gristly bite. 

somehow as she bravely plunged to the ocean’s depths eventually she began rising again and at last came up for air on the opposite side of the world.  crawled to the distant shore, welcomed by lost refugees of Atlantis. they lie and tell her there is no going back. she marches anyway on slippery legs carrying the weight of parting words yet unspoken. she had traveled far from home, cast her lure, and caught her catch, but in a moment of weakness she returned him to the sea and would spend countless years trying to drown the sorrow of that parting to no avail. 

**