Empty

Silence with energy buzzing in your ears. Being crowded by Loneliness' windpipe crushing grip, all while standing in a field. I'm talking to haunted walls, the crumbling shell of a now empty home. Home has never been a roof and a bed, but instead it's been a body, a spirit. An empty body... don't we call that a corpse? Decaying flesh smells like the Arctic, like a shower and lavender, like mint. I coddle the carcass, rock back-and-forth, back-and-forth while letting it steal the heat from my body, dampen the fire from my eyes, rip the voice from my throat. For so long I've sliced off my skin for meat, all to make sandwiches for the starving. These haunted walls scream at me of the demons confined to jail cells. Since when was bone used as a building material? Dogs lick it clean of blood and puss and chew out the worming maggots that are trying to reach the liquid mush of what's left of a mind, the hounds soon start to gnaw the bars of the window. Bone splinters fill their mouths with blood and break their teeth of stone. Like a parent whose hair grays with every passing birthday for their child, with every anniversary of death mine falls in tufts onto the floor. When the kicking starts up I am forced to ask myself, What disease does this? What could possibly bring animation to the dead? It's flickering light from barely glowing embers that cast shadows on the rotting face that remind me of what a human is. Not merely a sack of bones wrapped in a pretty parcel of skin, but a bleeding heart. Hearts don't bleed when they've run dry. Too bad it's mine that's been drained of all, and not the lifeless body whose fingers don't try to intertwine with mine. Their once ivy touch, now cool chains. I figured if I cut a hole into myself, and fastened a spout like one that might be used to pour punch from a pitcher, then I could just keep filling the goblet that didn't belong to me. But when he drank my last drop and smiled, the glow of the fire showed red teeth grinning up at me and black eyes staring through. The baby without the heartbeat had turned into the demon that had once crawled throughout its nightmares. I'd allowed myself to care more for the shell than the angel that lurked inside the walls, never truly haunted, just misunderstood.