Bosch and Caravaggio Bathing

Coffee is hot, dark, and all encompassing

Shame and guilt are pervasive and I sit

With the loss, recovery is letting go 

Replacing and rebuilding 

Removing the dangerous spikes and spores

But it's also loss, loss of something 

That became everything 

"Surely you should be able to give something up that caused so much pain, that made you a liar that lit the funeral pyre under your life and your unsuspecting chosen few, your nearest dearest"

But, it's not that simple. It is but it isn't ever that simple

Desperation and the disparate emotional attachment to the images the dopamine rush and the damage done feels like a gulf, an abyss that swallows such preposterous thoughts as "sound reasoning, good judgement and conscience" in favour of those quick and short-lived and ultimately huge higha and lead-lined lows that stop you ever feeling free or fine.

Halfway down the mug the coffee stains like chem trails across a pale November sky and the bitterness, 

the earthiness inhabits my olfactory senses commanding them 

as I ruminate on the scars unseen beneath my clothes 

At my most naked they remain out of shot, out of sync with the steam of time and space, but still I feel them I see them and I think people might see them 

The scars on the one who hurt the most outside my own body and mind, her scars are sculpted, sketched into the lines of her face on the days when she can't quite contain the anger as her milk diluted coffee soothes her morning blurs.

Cream balms but can't erase 

Erasure impossible 

Closure potential 

So we move on together

With hope as foreign and as alien as it may actually be, with hope as microscopic as it may actually be 

Is still hope 

Hopeful or hopeless 

careful or careless 

A smile flashes across her face and we forget

A silly joke a small animal snapshot 

We don't forget but we shift it a few inches to the right or left of our peripheral vision

But it's. Still there 

Like the remains of our coffees the stains of our coffees in mugs 

The stains of my sins, the scars of my sins 

Need cleansed 

Trust earned 

"Surely you should be able to give something up that caused so much pain, that made you a liar that lit the funeral pyre under your life and your unsuspecting chosen few, your nearest dearest"

Outside of the thick of the fog of the clawing, clogging, coagulated, and congealed mist that  arrests my senses, I understand that perception

But when you are cut you heal 

or if you cut you heal

but what happens 

when the cuts are more than skin deep and unseen except in your partner's eyes or your own reflection staring back at you defeated and let down 

I yearn to be someone else afflicted, 

Afflicted differently,

But not ever

no not ever 

no one else 

As narcissus and Dorian are laughing 

Bosch and Carravagio are bathing

The other me, his trail of pee

Semen and blood, sebum

But I close the package marked 

return to sender 

The great pretender 

Who wants to surrender

As the bodies collide 

But never dismember 

On the small screen 

To keep me unclean