But I'm Still Listening

She is stuttering down a badly connected phone line that went dead seven and a half minutes ago. She wants to tell you that she is parting her lips to scalding water and letting her tongue burn. She wants you to know that she only lives for midnight when, eyes glazed, she is mesmerised by the way the clock breathes 00:00 like time doesn't exist. Like it never has done and never will again: like she never existed.

She is holding her lungs in balled-up fists in an exchange for ceasefire, while all the time wondering why she feels so empty. She stands with no protection as the sky rips itself apart, because at times like these they are the same. She wants you to know that she needs the rain to wash her away.

She doesn't quite trust herself to stay conscious when she blinks, so she's given up sweeping dust away from the headlights. After all, she's only atoms and who really cares?

Believing that tomorrow's dawn will erupt into paper leaves and frosted blueprints for breathing is just too difficult for her to handle. All she can see are the dwindling lives of battered crows stalking the rooftops, and the way we're clutching onto the bones of this planet as it hurtles towards a black hole. Oh, she'd like to believe, but she arrives too early to every surprise party they throw her, and all her insignificant failures echo through each slice of bone marrow inside her skull. It's weighing down her corpse in deep water, and she just can't remember how to breathe.

I think she appeared here with the mind of a cynic and the veins of a pessimist, and guess what; she was always the one who forgot the birthday card.