my favorite drink

you called yourself a fleeting thought in my head a means to an end my love you said, was a candle in the wind

but baby don't you see
how I keep running to you
even as the soul of my shoes rips open
and the rocks press into my feet
I trip over the shoelace
concrete puncturing my face
I am bruised and broken yet I get up and run to you

every time you hurt me
I sit there and I take it
and I sling my sword over your shoulder
forming a cut
nice and long but never as deep
as the wound in my heart
a wound shaped like you
that you carved slowly with that poison-laced knife
slowing my beats and reducing their count

and you leave your blood dripping
all over my floor
red and hot and as dark as your soul
that blood I lick clean with my swollen tongue in which my teeth dig as I choke on the words I hold back
the unnatural purple caressing and kissing the floor
like it caressed and licked your body on top of mine

after all that, I washed my tongue for months
cleaning and scrubbing
and tasting other drinks
until the taste of your blood had almost vanished from my mouth
the addiction had ceased and the cravings of you stopped
but my heart lay on the ventilator needles poked into him
sucking out your poison and healing the wound of a knife

and then you knocked on my door
I'll let you back in
to which you slit your arm
and asked me to open my mouth
that I covered with my fingers as tight as you had once shut your heart
refusing you access to the hold you had on me

yet you poured your blood every other day on my lips that still remained zipped
until the moment they parted open
to release the breath I had been holding
and it slipped in within seconds
grabbing me by a tender chokehold
and then you tore open the bandage wrapped around my heart
pulled out the needles filled with your antidote
giving me another sip of that blood I craved