You get used to the taste of blood, the way it runs down your chin with every word. You get used to the way your teeth cut your lips and tongue. The clots in your throat, words you’d like to cough up. Spit them past the choke onto indifferent sidewalk. It’s always cement: something about the gray, the wet slap of rough landings. It’s never the fall that hurts.

Hands stay busy, they have to, same way lungs and heart do. An assemblage of sharks trapped in an ocean of skin and bone. Animals in captivity lose their minds, doing laps, wearing deep paths around the outside. They turn on each other sometimes, fraternity swallowed by violent entropy. I feel them.

Slipping my filth-slick fingers into the cracks of progress, the way I dug them into you. Peeling the skin back off my face to breathe, grotesque in my solitude. I’m supposed to love her too. Beautiful containment cell conditioned to function as social lube. It’s easier when I smile bright enough to blind you.

On my back in shallow water, mouth open to the drowning rush. Just gotta keep your nose clean so you can stand back up. At least it’s quiet, maddened animals pacified. Another stone in the river, it’s easy enough now to let it wash over, close my eyes. Easy enough to let go of the blood.