Comfort

Stay with me here –
we peppered the landscape
with doll parts and plaster brains,
ravaged one another with ravishment,
and called it quits before supper.
We scrawled graven images
in the upper atmosphere
to watch over us in our sleep.

Only now is anyone waking up
to what deep shit we’re in.
Pleasantries are involved
on an emotional level.
A thousand screaming faces
reveal themselves in the fog –
Call them specters,
if you’re feeling politically correct,
if you’re feeling comfortable.

All I know of comfort anymore
is peeling the skin from my lips
as their wailing whips me into shape
and feeling mine own pickled blood
drape purposefully o’er my teeth.

-r. miller