Lupus

Sidewalks of our old neighborhood detached themselves from distorted roads. The concrete serpent constricts me from time to time. It's the only embrace that's really true. A woman with red skin avoiding the sun like her emotions. Used to nothing other than death. Every want I had was punished with a trip to the prison you constructed in your yelling. Condemned to feel sympathy for things I didn't understand. There were middle schoolers writing my condemnations in the hallways and beautiful women trying to burn me from their minds. My nylon fantasies boiled worry in that heart you occasionally put in the refrigerator. Our home was my shanty asylum where the armed villagers could never find me. Contact is cancer. Today everything is gone. The safe home whittled away with your immune system. Society grows on my conscious like malignant cells. Touch me, embrace me like I never did. Bring back the days of the first diagnosis. I'm holding on to a stone body with your name etched in it. And years...