days like these my headache is more a crown than a halo, embracing my skull tighter than any monstrous lover imaginable, burying me face down in the thicket of emerald grass somewhere in the sunset. my eyes shut tight i soon overflow with flashbacks, days like these their blazing engravements hot and clear. his gun cocked, his pretty face split in half with that remarkable ear-to-ear sneer - that’s the first image that comes to mind whenever i try to recall Rider in flesh, detailed, tangible Rider whose shadow consumed me so gracefully; knives, scalpels, hatchets, needles, awls, screwdrivers in the deadly grip of his piano fingers, long, frail and pale, at the time when i was so lost & dissolved in him it didn’t even bother me that they always ended up driven into someone else, anyone would do as long as it wasn’t me, such bitter irony for the most willing sacrifice he ever had. the thud of his beaten dusty combats against rotten wood of the floor in the house we would hovel in during that summer, that was apparently too big, too old, too alien and too ancient for the two of us to occupy on a constant basis, so it always felt like a crime despite him officially owning the thing. the fragmented reflection of the wonderful world outside caught in his mirrored raybans as we lay on the crumbling porch, diverse cruelty of his kisses. my present smells like grass and gasoline and i thank the allfather for that as the stench of being alive is the most trustworthy way out of the memory trap i’m aware of. days like these i feel beaten and failed, lost in the sun as soon as his shadow chose to move away. the absurdity of his mercy foreseen through the intricate network of scars on his forearms, strychnine bitterness of his tears. days like these i merely drag around the corpse of mine that he denied separating me from as if some fretful surgeon denying the operation based on the harmony diagnosed in the tandem of the patient and his illness. that is my eternally beloved Rider, the broken promise of the ultimate end, regretful denial of euthanasia, the vicious grin of the waning moon