Feeling crept into awareness, subtle flavor I nearly missed lingers on my tongue. Alone I stand starring at the mirror, my face starring back at me. Flushed red frowning, puffy anger clinging to cheeks like rusted barnacles, all this I feel from the emptiness surrounding me, when your not here.

My imagination is pulling away from reality so quickly. I am sure my mind is beginning to resemblance a dirty clothes hamper, tangled and rotting from within.

I miss your touch upon my mind, your whisper in my ears. Only you can deliver a wretch like me, only your scent can awaken me bringing me to my senses. Only you hold the magic, you bare the fruit of life that I seek so deeply within my shattered shell. Only you…. only you. Only your touch can coax the blood back into my lifeless corpse, only you, no one else.

The razor’s dull blade chafed skin beneath snow white Barbasol mimicking the unevenness that marked my failed life. Each nick reminding me of dreams long ago blushing pregnant, with promise. Now I wished to join those vanquished hopes following them down the drain of my corroded mind. Routine has become a prison and I have become both inmate and executioner.

I ache to run, arms flaying at missed opportunities chasing their ghosts into outer space, forgetting I ever had dreams of big things, I want to forget touching your skin with ten fingers both rough and soft, pinching your flesh and kissing each inch of you, you telling me “I love your breath on my body, your tongue licking me, I love you.”

I want to forget memories bubbling beneath snow white Babasol as I scrape layers of time from my face, with this dull rusted razor.

I exist this moment upon unforgiving sidewalks neatly stepping along rolled out concrete ribbons, my feelings confined by bounding brick limestone apartments soaring high in the blue sky. My eyes focus straight ahead desperately reigning in a wandering imagination before traveling down naked alleys, proposing marriage to empty gutters, asking to not be swallowed. Lost in a city far from anything I know, sidewalk’s rising up, slapping me with concrete loneliness sucking life from me with radiating hot damp heavy air. Motherless children gathered on stoops spit as I pass yelling edgy breast puffing obscenities, pitiful birch pretending to mellow agitated passengers crawling from underground, crowds encased in transparent shells held together with yellowing anxiety, blocks of cavern facades shrink self esteem exposing open sores, red canopies shade peers who remark to themselves over gin, how foreign I look. I walk pissing tears conjugating bits of memory pressing toward something I don’t know, sidewalk walking with nothing to do. Haunting beautiful girls and boys turn away too busy building neurotic walls, vendors close doors pretending to nap. There are no white clapboards with green shutters pointing the way home, no hula hoops nor backyard picnics inviting me to leave my troubles in the wind. I’m walking hands folded praying dark joins cool night air letting me sleep to dream of lost touches and gentle kisses, of red noses that made me smile so long ago.

Startled minds ramp into flaring comatose consciousness, jump starting sight, adjusting hearing, grabbing the one next to you, shaking her, wake up wake up something’s happening here.

There was a knock at the door, a knock at the door, there was a knock at the door.

Emotions spinning me into torrid thoughts, whirlpooling down a rusted drain into a river of out of control, running toward the back door ready to explode with fists and teeth, repulsing intrusive fears.

Yelling, belching, moving around screaming hitting extending rage with fleshy force.