they said i killed you: my dear blue-veined beauty.

they said these hands of mine snuffed your life-that i plucked your lovely soul between my dirt-chipped fingers. they claim i'm your killer; you're a murderer! a filthy fucking murderer! they cry. their breaths reek with the rotten scent of damnation and flawed accusations. i know it's not truth but their voices ruin my withered guts. how could i have hurt you? you were more of a goddess than a girl when i met you and gods could never die.

how could i forget? pale skin like the soft evening glow of a moon; white flesh stolen from starlight. blue-veined like dying bluebells on crying mornings, blue-blooded like tearful hydrangeas under a water's lulling current. pale skinned, cresent boned, and milk scented. skin you could see through. skin you could dive through. skin that you could pierce through with one single unmerciful touch. lips. lips swollen as if rather than me a bee had kissed you; slowly and gently with the warmth of it's hum and bronze stinger. blooming and bursting at the seams like a tormented poppy. red and ripe like poisoned cola-a tang so bitter and unforgiving it leaves you wanting more.

i remember all of your bruises. they are timeless tethered pieces of art. like the love we made sprawled along those sheets. your wounds were like a map. one i'd follow to the ends of the earth. each island. each continent. each ocean. held a history of pain, love, struggle, and lost. tender bruises painted black and blue, but you didn't mind the pain. the pain didn't make you forget.

the pain didn't dwell on you like weeping willow. pain reminded you that you were real. that we were real. that this pain i've purposely caused in acts of small pillow-talk and pleasure was real and raw like bloody lips grazing the pavement of soft-scraped knuckles. but your scars were much more different, much older. like the echoing aftermaths of a defeated war. battle scars that told a story before you tore out all the pages with your razor-bladed knife. i gently counted the cratered scars upon your skin. you weren't perfection but i called you god. and i've kissed them a thousand times to let you know that even the purest on angels would take hell by its hands for you.

but your dead. they said they found you; a dead goddess floating in ichorless water.

they said your death was painful. no peace to be found in the empty vessel of your body. the jaws of death sunk into your delicate flesh, as the last buzz of life-a saintly testament, your ode to our love lost amongst the ruined ripples of the creek.

they told me how you struggled: parchment lungs battling to breathe as someone held the thin vine of your neck under the heavy mercy of waters womb. struggling. you were struggling. your throat pillaged by burning water, fresh water bubbles rupturing inside your caved ribs. dying. you were dying. as if god couldn't hold to your dying breath, as is god couldn't hold on to the angle wing that is your life: tender, golden, light, and soft. your life snuffed by the devil's fingertips

they said I killed you. they called me evil. they said I took your life, that I wrapped my hands around your throat and pressed and pressed and pressed till oxygen became an illusion, till your eyes swelled out of rim of your sockets, irises glistening with weathered tears, all glassy red like rotting lillies wilting under a red moon

they said I killed, that I drowned you, I broke your neck, that I'm twisted, and that I'm sick, but the sick don't know love, the sick don't know love like I do, like you do, like we do. they don't know how love is a sickness: a sickness etched in my bones, the very veins of my tongue, the heart of my palms, in the core of my words.

they say i'm all these things and lock me up like i'm some sort of animal, delivering my death sentence like a cold heart on a silver plate. they think I deserve this. that death will tear me apart. they say the wicked don't cry, they say murderers don't weep, they say the evil don't pray, they say the rotten don't sleep but yet there's a crying ocean grasping my eyes, there's a stone in my chest weighing down every breath i take, there's a broken boy locked in the soul of a man, there a lover who has lost and lost again, but all they see is a bastard damn to his own river of tears.

and i imagine it for a moment: a death by injection, a daring needle drawn by a devil in white. star-crossed poison crawling in my veins, a swimming pool of venom sinking in my gut numbing the nerves in my system until i reach blackened oblivion. i imagine it: a death by shock, i'm screaming as i'm dragged by jailers, their meaty fingers digging in my collar bones, leather restraints around my wrists, the hiss of electricity screeching in my ears, lightning crackling under my skin, stopping my heart with an unworthy whisper. i imagine it: death. the soul of a child, the mind of an adult, the pain of the growing youth. death and it's wilting innocence continuing the cycle of tragedy.

they give me no option other than to suffer.

so with my bed sheets woven like a spiders web, lost to time through silk, this life is no longer mine. they won't see an innocent man with the heart of a bee but rather a wasp caught in hive of lies. they won't see that death had taken you from me in such a god-forsaken world. but they will know death is cruel but nothing is more cruel than a unspoken goodbye.

dear you, i hope you can forgive me.

~art~