430

It tastes like coins. Regret.
A metallic grainy after taste that can’t be
rinsed out. Not with whiskey, and not with prayer.
Tongue black like liquorice, and
fingers red with trying to push the words back in.
I was partial to whips, once.
The kind that you could pay penance with.
Or just to stare at long enough that welts could form on their own,
on the pale fleshed
mediocre mind that spends too long, in the dark.
Give me some sort of apocalypse, where
I can swing an axe guilt free. And call it survival.
Where the only reason to keep my eyes open,
is to see them coming.
I sit waiting already. But without the end of the world,
It’s reduced to simple paranoia.