Cigarettes, Ice, and The Sweet Ground [Poetry]

In Poetry by FaythFuILeave a Comment

Lights flash, of cigarettes and silently ticking street lights

Home smells like whiskey and lost memories

But the carpet still feels warm when I lay my face on it

Fibers kiss my cheek and I sleep in solitude

Till I wake up again and the carpet is no longer there

Home loses its warmth in the morning

Which one could say is funny, since that is when the sun rises

But I must leave, back to flashing lights, back to highs on grey lungs

And deafening smiles, and washes of computer screens, and dirty keyboards

And black coffee that is brash and bitter

When I’m not at home, I think about the warmth of the floor, the place

I find myself after most days when I unravel my skin and fall to pieces

Sometimes the dog will lick my forehead to coax me back to my senses

He wags his tail, he yelps and cries, and even brings me dinner

But I just lay there, and he curls up next to me. I place a hand between his

Ears and smile – he warms me when the floor does not, and when the

Whiskey hides too deeply in my stomach. I sleep, and he becomes the carpet.

I wake up again, my body hurts, I didn’t zip myself up well enough this time

I stumble to work, holding myself together with drug store band-aids and caffeine pills

Faces pass like fog on a dreary day, and all I can do is laugh when the cheap bandages fall to pieces and the pills wear off.

The pills always wear off, don’t they?

Or, maybe they just never work quite right for someone who’s tried them all.

But who says I’ll stop taking them?

My day is filled with chatter, click clacks, and constant cravings to be elsewhere. Not sure if that elsewhere is home

Since home is sometimes so silent, I don’t even know if it has a voice anymore – it spoke to me much more often when I was young – it would open its doors, welcoming my presence and my vigor for living soundly inside it.

And now I hardly hear whispers – I became deaf from the noise, the bad noise that started to fester inside it, because the good noise (just vanished?), and I yelled till my vocal cords snapped, and silence overtook me. The only way to survive was to swallow ice, until my insides were frozen – unfeeling, unknowing, or knowing, but not caring to know.

I’ve just packed up and left, haven’t I? Where did I go? I’m not sure who’s in this skin anymore. I can pull the flesh around my eyes, but I still don’t see me. I see bloodshot veins through whites and dark echoes behind black circles.

Where am I?

Maybe the sweet ground knows, the thing that is so close, but so peculiarly distant.


With everlasting encouragement

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