Revised Version

No one wants

to walk on this side
of the street.
It is the side
you take
when there are no other options,
when you’ve seen death
more than you’ve seen life,
when roots claw through concrete,
their black veins curling
around your ankle.

I am in a bathroom,
floor slick with piss,
jackpot trembling in my veins,
chewing, spitting, grinding—
you between my teeth.
It’s been
seventeen years
and we still hang on,
but these days
I have to choke
to swallow.

I think—
this is my way out:
die laughing,
die with a spoon in my fist,
die in the lap of a lover’s smoke,
do it grand—
from the overpass,
in the middle of a street,
with a razor
on the front porch
of something I swore off
years ago.

Because they’d least expect it now,
and it’s all downhill.
Time drags its iron chain
across my chest—
nothing lightens.

No one has ever loved you.
No one ever will.

But this one—
the one that swirls in amber circles,
dissolving like sugar glass
on the fat swell of your pink tongue,
the one that slicks its flame
over your gums,
tricks your throat
into thinking it’s safe—
you’d marry it,
if death signed the papers.