𝘤𝘩𝘪𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 ; 𝐀 𝐏𝐎𝐄𝐓𝐑𝐘 𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊

countdown.

There's a countdown in the back of my head, dilapidated pixels scraping across a screen

Like prongs on a plate

I try to undo the wires but the red and blue get mashed in a heap

That could only be untangled through a graphite vessel

So here we are.

***

Does your chest ever just... swell?
When your eyes roam over a spark-dancing glance or a tongue-soaking rhyme
And you're left in an incandescent sop on the ground
(It's a miracle my capillaries haven't bursted at this rate.)

I like to think that all pleasure is just the swell being rationed and released
    Like your guts want to wrap the world in a tender acidic technicolor dam-breaking embrace but instead your brain just goes foodsexwaterskinsugarlights
    (It would make us seem less empty, at least.)

But there are some people in the world, I think
    Who ache saccharinely when they find they can't tap
    Into their vessel's stores all at once
(Maybe that someone is everyone, maybe I am everyone and that reincarnation bullshit was right all along.)

Maybe they string the longing into foxglove flower crowns
Or softly breath out forget-me-nots as they tease the surface of their ambitions with promises of "not yet"
Or maybe
        they burst
And maybe
        the flowers wilt from their mephitic touch and rhythm dies gasping in their palms and art can't splatter so it just melts and words
                            don't
                            work
                            anymore.

What do they do then?
    When the swell taints everything they do, marring all their negligible footsteps as a winding trail of snapped relationships and dead Glo-stick passions follows behind them like a gossamer dress train

Well, they do what they can
    With the wires that they can
        And the color-coded alphabetized bleedingburningbrewing batteries that they can
            And

            they

            count

            down.