PISCINES VIDES

you were taught to crumble not love

rose hip sunsets flush over your sea stained skin. you spell out god with your iced fingertips touching the rivers of bruises on your neck, hoping that one day you stop your servile urges to please your long gone dad. rotting peaches and fermented blood rests between your creased palms but your mouth still bleeds with prayers as if they could ever help you. you've learnt to destroy yourself for others, the obsequious edges of your tattered heart beating with the hurricane of forgotten words between us.

you've learnt to bleed yourself out with the rising suns and faltering blue moons, because you were taught to beg for love with lachrymose eyes and crimson stained lips. you learnt to mother lacerated tongues and dead eyes because you couldn't bear to see your reflections in others. you still sing broken melodies with your alcohol drowned throat for your absent father because you don't know how to not love him. you don't know how to accept love because you've been wired to believe love is a price－ you need to give something to have it; but you don't. you dilute the corroded landmarks of cruelty on your skin with vodka because you've forgotten how to speak in a world which only clamped your jaws shut and dug its nails into the supple flesh of your neck. 

i want to kiss away the tragedy that festers in the cavities of your bones, i want to hold you and make you realise that love is not a price for cracked ribs and bruised knuckles. love is beautiful and warm, not cold and decaying like the the knives they used to carve your heart out. but i know you would still twirl at the edge of bloodstained blades and mistake it for love because you were never taught love darling. you were taught to crumble, not love. 

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a/n
yes i listened to daddy issues by nbhd while writing this poem, thank you very much.