Tonight, we murder all the lights in the sky. The city tosses a martini glass full of fluorescence in their eyes and I laugh. You go, girl. She grabs Centauri by the hair and shoves his face into a bucket of smog. His siblings beg for mercy so she lets his head come up just long enough for me to whisper in his ear, I know you don’t know anything. I don't give a fuck about your answers, more than once I’ve nailed my heart to a telephone pole and heard nothing but the flipping of pages, the shuffling of a deck of cards by hands that have nothing to spare for anything as starved as mine.
Jupiter puts up a fight, but Mercury is a little bitch. Too scrawny for his own sky, you wouldn’t blame him for my bones on your nightstand. So I pry off another metacarpal and say, here, I will sell this to you for nothing but your expression when you take it from me. Tuck it away. Listen to it rattling against your silverware when I think of breaking myself on the subway.
I get home at five a.m. and the sky is empty. That helps.
I don’t want to remember when I looked up and everything made sense for the last time. There was no lattice in the stars, only so much dark between them that I could have vanished and left behind every weak flutter of love like a ribbon drifting on the ocean’s cheek while I sank out of everything and everyone. Nothing mattered to all that dark with light just dust on its cape. But I held my feet because the road beneath them was only mine, and because I thought of you, how in all that dark we were both here, floating in it. We might as well have been holding hands.
Alexander is a thing of Brooklyn who enjoys desecrating legal pads and tormenting his cherished friends with the absurdities born thereof. He lives with four cats and the usual number of hands. For proof, you can follow him on Instagram @talldarkanddark and Twitter @talldarkanddark.