Look at those blue eyes; look at how he chews his tongue as a blanket of ash covers her pale almost translucent face as snow falls heavy like a fist upon angelic teeth. Y’know how it is- beauty needs to be possessed, it needs to be destroyed because those without it are impotent and afraid. She is her own ecosystem- she is a neutron star that in a certain light could be a screaming child hiding from her father in a shed at the foot of the garden. Look at the tears rolling down her face. Look at the way she digs her fingernails into the palms of her hands as he approaches snapping that leather belt of his. I sing no psalms. I offer no evidence to suggest there could ever be a way out. And yet there’s always a way out. The city is a drunken kiss. It’s a body beneath the wheels of a bus bleeding out into the gutter as the world carries on regardless. And as I see those lips, and I see those eyes, I breathe in the scent of a woman not afraid of being a woman. It makes me bite my lower lip so eagerly. It causes me to tilt my head to one side in awe of such beauty and strength. There’s a cigarette in my hand, but it’s not really there. There’s a lover upon her lips, but he’s not really there, either. While she kisses thinking of what it would feel like to be free, he’s just busy like a bee trying to finger his way inside a flower he knows will one day end up between the pages of a book. Sometimes it’s London. Sometimes it’s a greasy spoon the likes of which your mother used to eat in before the cancer got in her belly and ate it’s way up through her chest and into her throat and then deep into her puzzle-piece brain. The days were once acid; they dissolved like a tablet upon the tongue of the one who used to rock you to sleep when sleep was what you sought above all else. These days- they run away with rumour and cheap breeze, so gentle and savage within the same, strange and lucid touch. Be a feather. Be a stone. Be a dream that tickles the belly of someone beautiful until they fall through the floor into a swirling pool of honey and angel breath.