Midnight Drag

by A. Jian

Primarily, your fingers work as stalactites,
Reaching across the span of worlds in search of a flicker of warmth
Embedded in the pregnant silences in the early morning
Something to prove existentialism is not applicable to your surroundings.

These frayed nerve endings can still wrap around the music
though your pale skin shivers and shakes at the sound
of another broken window, glass panes mirroring your own
Each starting car passes through your bones like pinpoints on a map you hate.

Your lips feint hesitation as they spell out enticements
They break off each syllable like matches of your midnight cigarettes.
The smoke curls around my tongue as chickadee whispers whip across dusk
It’s not yet time for the syncopation of these moves to be let loose.

You breathe in rhythm with the twitches in the grass and I can’t help to wonder
Darling, your ebony sins make your skin look more surgical than ever.
Pinprick pupils on the brink of elixirs and passions reunited in the plaster
We can’t seem to crash these cars at the same time and place.

Do the pills and liquid lyricism you suck up like a drowning artist
make you feel the solutes and solutions in the blood in your veins?
Your skin must pull through your flesh each night if you hear
those hypnotic heresies in the thrumming, drumming crimson.