I am laying with legs spread wide in the dirt and the thistles of a pitch black forest.

Your weight on me is all I can focus on. How heavy, how oppressive, as I claw into your back with lacquered almond nails to match the color of your thick blood.

It's as if I actually feel gravity crushing me. As if you are the atmosphere that keeps everything from floating dreamily into the inky dark of space.

Your mouth vibrates with the sound of your groans, your growls. And if the inflection of those primal sounds were words and I filled a volume with them, it would be my holy book.

Your cum is my holy water.

The taste of your winter-chapped lips is my holy communion. The stain of red wine on your dingy white shirt is the blood of Christ.

Under hot moonlight, and cautiously blinking stars, you fill me.

And I know that what you fill me with is the keenest torture masquerading as that immensely coveted " true love" that people would die for. That I am dying for.

You pump into me pretty and potent lies. You breath venom into my mouth and it tastes like the nectar of the gods and it numbs my need like Novocaine.

So bad that it's good. Hurts so much that it makes me feel alive.

I spread my arms out and I claw at the soil until I feel it embed under my nails, feel vines catch on my knuckles and all the squirmy little earth worms writhing and pulsating like a heartbeat.

You drag your teeth down my sternum and I just know you'll suck my heart out any moment. Consume every last bit of me here in the darkness where no one can hear me cry out.

And I am willing! I am willing to be consumed!

Because it looks like love.

And it feels like love.

But it's a fine fucking mess and we both know it and so we fuck our doubts and our blinding unhappiness away in the earthen dark. And the drum of our mingling pulse sounds exactly like the footfalls of someone running away. Trying to escape.

And as I throw my head back and expose the iridescent paleness of my sinewy neck, I willingly expose my jugular to you. That big ripe vein.

I'd let you bite into it. I'd let you kill me.

Because it looks like love.

And it feels like love.

And even if it isn't, in the dark I can't tell the difference. 

When I was a little girl, I liked to run.

I liked to hear the wind whistle in my little ruddy ears.

Feet caked with earth, little bits of grass between my toes.

I liked to run in my pearl-white dress. Raspberry ribbon tied around my waist.

Crumpled silk, and a ring I secretly pilfered from my mother's jewelry box. Too big even for my chubby cherub hands. I lost it in the tall grass.

I'd run as fast as I could push my legs. Shrubs would catch my bare, rounded arms. Thistles clinging to my capped sleeves.

Running until I rolled my ankle on a sneaky little rock.

And then my body would collapse, I'd nurse my wounded joint and then fall onto my back into daisy patches.

Clouds like cats, and bunnies, and dragons above. Clouds rolling above me ever so slowly.

I'd spread out my arms like angel wings and feel the little black beetles and sweet little potato bugs pass over my arms.

The smell of summer like no other smell.

When I was a little girl, I tore through the woods and splashed in the creek, and tried to catch crawdads. I called them crawdaddies. 

I watched tadpoles wriggle.

I had black dirt all the way up my shins.

I liked to be alone, dragging my dolls by the arms through hydrangea bushes. Burying trinkets in secret places.

Shimmers of a silver tea spoon before I covered it in dirt. Little rubber bracelets boys gave me in school hidden all over the garden.

I picked blackberries until my fingers had a sanguine hue. I ate the whole bowl before I ever made it home with them.

My knees were grass-stained. Scraped up.

My body was lived-in, dirty and prickled and plump with sunshine.

When I was a little girl, I snuck into my neighbors yard and crawled into their rabbit hutch.

I pet little fluffy things. I felt safe. I hid.

When I was a little girl...

I never wanted to be home. I danced in the rain, and sweated pure young sweat in the summer sun, and sled down grassy knolls covered in powdery snow on the lid of a garbage bin.

I never wanted to be inside.

And when I did it was only to clumsily grab a luscious cherry popsicle, like a ruby in my mind's eye, I craved it so.

I was a pure, fresh, un-marred thing with gold highlights in my hair.

When I was a little girl, I used to run. For fun. From nothing.

Now that I am a big girl, I run for different reasons. To escape.

She is candy when she's hot and pliable.

She is double jointed taffy.

She bends forward to kiss you, and backward to please you.

She is your island.

The dreamy place you go when your body lilts and your eyes go vacant.

She's got long tawny arms. Soft, golden, downy little hairs on them.

She's got plush lips. Little mauvey pillows.

When she speaks she whispers. When she speaks, she echoes.

Her breasts heave when she gasps for air. And she gasps for air when you leave the room. Only then.

She has coal-black hair. Sooty tendrils that stick to the wet kiss you left on her cheek.

And you love the way it feels when it falls into your face. You breath her in. She smells unfamiliar.

You like to wrap one hand around her knobby, young wrists. Hold them tight.

Whisper into the seashell curve of her ear " All mine, all mine, all mine."

When she squares her shoulders and draws up her spine, and straightens out all the little kinks and curves in her body, do you think she's standing at attention for you?

Or is she bracing for impact.

Your little cotton candy girl.

Her little cotton candy panties.

You slip a $100 bill into them.

She produces that practiced smile.

You see sunshine in it.

You want to pop a lollipop between those lips.

Is it love?

Does she surrender her soul to you?

Can you surrender your soul in 1 hour?

When she leaves, the room smells stale.

Your eyes refocus.

You leave your island.

I am not your slut.

With Pepto Bismol-pink blood and hair made of sunshine.

I am not tantric.

I don't flex and bend and mold to your contours as if I were made to fill your empty spaces.

I will not pump you full of assurances while I slowly deflate.

I am not your princess.

This tiara is my Band-Aid and the light bounces off it's little man-made diamonds, deflecting your consumption of my soft Bambi heart.

I am not Daddy's Little Angel,

Just because some of the glitter on my skin has rubbed off on your puffed up chest.

I don't vamp for you.

Not even when my lip gloss is ripe strawberry red and smeared across my summer-brown cheeks with your watered down saliva on my bruised clavicle.

When you kiss my earlobe, I feel you sucking at my sense of self. 

Drawing my autonomy out of me only to spit it on the pavement with your vodka gorged lips.

I was not made to drip little bits of myself into your veins like morphine.

Your power comes from possession.

You infect, and then thrive off the fever it gives me.

You press your cheek to my burning breast.

You rest your head against my sternum and tell me how soft I am. 

You say that I smell good.

Your nails make cat scratches on my chubby tummy.

I am not yours.

I don't put mascara on so that you can watch my eyes get wet and drip black stains down my slackened jaw.

Release my immobile body.

Stop paralyzing the girl who used to nearly cry out with unrestrained happiness.

You steal my joy.

You suffocate my hope.

You drown my self-esteem in your creamy syrup.

Your love potion.

You absorb my will.

You run your sweaty fingertips over the scars on my thigh and you romanticize my vulnerability without ever asking why the scars are there.

You would bury my see-through body in a barbie pink casket after you sucked me dry.

You would put cornflower blue ribbons in my hair.

You would tell everyone what a very pretty girl I was.

Here lies my slut

She smelled of English roses

She could never say no to me

She was such a good girl

Rest in pieces.