Pull Back the Shower Curtain

your hands are caked with dirt and once it is under your fingernails it remains

forever, you have buried yourself but still walk among the living

they can’t see under your fingernails, or choose not to

how does one ever know? death

is only a state of extreme fatigue

dark chocolate shies away from your lips

all your fears assimilate like hair

in a shower drain. it, not fear, stares at you

with yellowed teeth and jaundiced eyes from the gap

in the curtain it pulled back with one long finger

grace of a cat - unluck of the ‘A’ beneath a ladder

salt over the shoulder disappears in its emptiness

in the night it holds your heart squeezes in the rhythm and quicker and quicker and quicker

until the blood has flooded your jaw it is all you can do not to scream

to start a garden is to invite in death, stifle life

choke it out with invasive thorns of loneliness

its thorns greedy from inside you