Queen

Short poem.

You are the rotting remains,
The dregs in your tea cup.
The saliva tainted swill at the bottom of the bottle.
You twist on lover’s doorknobs,
Dead bolted and double locked.
You, desperately squinting through reversed peepholes.
It’s a blur, but the moans of the woman
You pissed on your soul for
echo off the walls inside.
The woman who whispered sweet poetry in your ear.
Who would trace the lines of your palm and play fortune teller.
“I will be the queen, and you will be my king.
You will slay my demons and cut them to pieces,” she says.
You are her demons.
After, you scribbled in notebooks in slanted cursive
Your wrist flicked as fast as a hummingbird’s pulse
Over and over the sentence,
“All hail the Queen.”
until the page was a mixture of your ghosts and
the blood ebbing out of your self inflicted slants.