unfamiliar lips always taste like fernet in the shadows, campari in the highlights. i don’t care for mint or grapefruit, much less their taste together as saliva denatures the plonk, but here i am living. here i am chasing last call like a reset button, a series of decisions i can explain away so easily the more syrup and citrus and octane slides down my gullet.

i molt in the mornings, pushing my softness into the shapes formed by someone else’s body in bed beside mine. eventually my skin will warp away from myself, its own form of natural selection. nothing is safe about tarrying here, and all i know how to do is waste time in the muck. i don’t know what to call myself but i am certain it cannot be human—look at the ravines that crisscross the parts of my body i can still claim. look at what’s lost, the spleen and bile and lungs snatched by scavengers while i was unconscious. i have reconstructed myself like a primitive hybrid, what’s left of my flesh.

fortnights will pass and the cycle will roll itself over, playing dead for a moment sometimes only to reanimate before my eyes. i considered myself something like a buddhist once, but i’m really a tick—i never detach enough to stop suffering. i take us both down.