there is a purple wall he stares at sitting in a purple chair in a purple room of a purple house. the street is purple, the cars are purple, the trees are purple. only the sun is as black as his heart. he stares at the purple wall and grips the arms of the chair with a fierce determination lest he fall out of it. he has been falling for quite some time, there are deep scratches on the floor where the pulp beneath the finish feels naked. it sounds very much the way hands do rubbing along the brick wall of a building that has had hands much older build it from scratch. he gets up from the chair and walks up to the wall that takes as forever to reach the way wrinkles take a great amount of time to leave their impression. he leans on it and it, in turn, shudders. the whole house shudders, the street shudders, the trees shudder down purple leaves that curl into crackling things when they touch each other. the sun cracks, a mirror without shade, white light bleeds through but everything remains purple except for fragments bled with static from a radio in the bedroom above him. a conversation over a very short amount of time, beginning-middle-end, end-beginning-middle, end-end-end, a loop without a station. through the window he hears her, he lets go of the wall. the wall falls, the chair falls, the floor above him falls, the building falls. everything into broken pipes and split frames around his feet, standing in the middle of a purple square of rubble where the streets have turned suddenly black into this sound.

she just couldn’t handle it anymore, the whining, the begging, the something or the other that always plagued him about her. she was restless, he wanted control. it all used to come easy to him, one deal after another landing on his lap, there was never a question of how things were supposed to go. and when the difficulties arose in the outline of her skin, he found himself wondering how to fit her into his pocket, into his wallet, yet another token of how good his credit was. he sucked at life the way a baby does a breast and when she wrestled out from under his weight, he didn’t know what to do. he threatened and promised, cajoled and stalked, which just drove her even madder, in both senses of the word. she had paid a high price in her life to make it her own: she knew what she wanted and had a rough idea about how to get there and she wouldn’t be derailed from it. not for him, not for anyone, not for everything he promised her, not for millions.

you run with it, leap one foot in front of the other
& dash, across busy streets, uneven rooftops
you avoid tripping over orphaned cables & broken glass
barefoot to feel the dirt & the gravel, the crunch
of having tread over time accelerated, your body
flung at high velocity, your mouth a smear
of laughter braced by yellowed teeth
& arms willing to grab hold of anything

garbage piles up, the scattered refuse of toilet paper and pizza boxes, the lost hope that we will be clean, that someone else can take this all away. the streets become mired with sewer rats and roaches, crawling up the thin veil of my skin as i lay between cool black plastic bags, my legs trapped between steel dumpsters, green and hard. i would speak if my voice wasn’t sore from swallowing the dregs of beer bottles and pulp from nearly empty cartons. instead i twitch to keep them all at bay, to keep them from my nostrils, the stench of having thrown away something vital and necessary amongst the heap, wet and unusable.

there aren’t enough skewers in the world to stab out my eyes, pierce my tongue, pin my hands from reaching out and stealing everything from it, stuff it all into my head, my heart, pack the little piece of a soul i have left until i vomit happiness and kindness and love and all the things that make any life worth living.

you say, i’ll be home later
and you wander between the streets and the moon, tucking away the night inside the bottle between your lips, warm and drowning.
you say, i’m coming home
and you get lost, having made a left turn instead of the right one and you find yourself waiting at the corner as you pass yourself by.
you say, i’m home
and you cross the threshold and lock shut the door behind you, knowing that you’re still out there somewhere, waiting to go home.