Sharpened by the discarded knives of others, my fingernails became iron points of heart lusting joints. And now I lie here, brushing my lethal touch across my abdomen, soothed by the ease of forged steel for protection. Still, the threat of the closest knife only awaits a bargain of bloodshed that confuse my nightmares to dreams. So my nails, wielded for defense, are useless when it comes to blades sheened in desire.
The moon was an open wound in the blooming night sky, pouring a stream of adolescent ivory to uncover your every move. My irontips held at bay, I watched as you fisted the pommel, pointing it at my stone carved heart. I felt its warm tip press into my skin harder with each moment your lips bled life into mine. And while your arms wrapped themselves around my body, as if I were a present, a gift on this earth, the knife edged further. And the blade sliced through tissue as you fastened my hair beneath the curves of my ear. It sliced through all too easily against the thin sheet of paper I like to call steel.
The blood that leaks from the cover of my bones is nothing more than a wet token that now strokes me in your absence. Like the bruises on my neck that I yearn for while moonbeams highlight your white knuckles clutching muscle.
In the morning, in your absence, as if I walk through a series of toll gates to my mirror, I assess my worthiness through the bearings of your desire. The dried blood cracking against the sheen of curdling perspirations. The budding contusions that stipple the fragile skin of my nape, a map to the short moments that now lie in battled oblivion.
Where corpses and cobwebs dwell in darkness, I finger the spot not where you placed a memoir of desire, but rather where you left an imprint across abandoned territory– claiming it for a modicum time. My iron nails scratch the torn bindings of my indefensible heart, teasing it into horror as your sharpened knife only dug deeper last evening. Fingering the ditch of wounded flesh and studying how deep it traveled this time. How your sadist words laced with peril only seem to thrill my blood into a hungry swell until its color turns hopeful. Hungrier. Desperate. But to you, I’m simply a puppet in a ploy of sweet demise once our lungs plead for air to bring us home again.
Reality drowns my iron nails sharpened by the fallen blades of others, awaiting this one to slip from a grasp too— bloodier than all the rest and much sharper. I await a chunk of my cobwebbed organ to come with it but I’m no surgeon and can handle another scar across my chest. So I’ll tease myself into horror, practicing like all those other knife wielders did to me, readying for another conqueror. Paper is no steel. And knives are no hopeful hands exploring the wonders beneath. My iron nails are nothing but false hope.