Velcro Skin

Watching movies. Autopsies on warm, fragrant flowers. The weather is my only alibi. It was too much summer to have been murder. Accidents happen. Not everything can live. In the ways we expect.

Eighty degrees and humid. Maybe August isn't done taking pictures of us. In the grass we forgot to cut. In the weeds we're too tired to pull again. I had the hacksaw. I finessed it through the meat of the afternoon and watched for the leaves to grow back.

I knew they would. Try again to turn the dying into love.

I stomped on the empty branches. Feebly skipping a rope only I could see. A ghost. Gods in costumes made of men. Fucking hard enough to make the world listen. To make that giant cure fit into that tiny hole. The newest hole he'd made in himself. A puddle of heroin like an angry stripper still vibrating at the fold in his arm.

More alive than he'd ever been.

I could never say. But I'll always know.

Why he left us.