Apocalyptic Chest

The words that I waited for,
were different than the words that arrived, 
and there was melancholy inside of my chest,
it looked like a bottle of blue paint gurgling as it spills out, 
like poison that doesn’t taste like poison until you swallow it, 
doom that you are unaware of until you’re on the edge of it. 
I wonder if I waited for the unlikely, 
yet expected the lonely,
because I knew that someone that beautiful,
with such a cunning taste for words,
couldn’t have a mind that was anything but a terrible place,
couldn’t stay with anyone that the moment you said hello,
he started unpacking his suitcase.
So I think you knew too, 
which is why you chose blue paint 
to let cataract and plunge over the wreckage,
over the apocalypse in my chest, 
because you knew, out of all the hellish states of mind,
loneliness would taste the best. 

-anna sluder

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