our relationship was a ménage à trois, this love that we shared, those secrets we bared

it was her, me and crippling emotional divestment sharing a mattress of exposed springs and pillows wet with tears

she’d tie me in knots with her pretty tongue and leave me drenched in sweaty denials

when she placed her heart on a platter and asked me to care for it, a thousand brown wilted plants lay seeds in my dormant soil

her eyes always looked deeper than the surface of thick make up and hidden scales i reapplied with every lie my golden mouth could utter

i promised her forever but she left that meter running, it was an all day pass to the waterworks and occasional glimpses of sunshine

she loved to love the broken, but always got upset when she pulled back her arm to see a bloody stump

accusations of infidelity flew like darts into the bullseye of my third eye, the one i couldn’t access without the subtle threat of pain

her dry sense of humor beguiled when the wetness she exposed was imposed on a bed of desire

we danced cheek to cheek on thin strands of happily never after, her hands around my throat but i could tell what she was really after

i was a mile marker on the highway to never, a pothole on the pristine asphalt of her rigid route

we wrote a play in three acts, acted out each part with nervous stutters and cardboard scenic anxiety

but when it came time for the final scene, she had seen enough and fled into the orchestra pit in my stomach

our ménage à trois became a full fledged orgy of every muttered truth, all the little white lies, and promises we never meant to break

it was a crater of writhing bodies in which we lost sight of one another, consumed with consumption and the steadily increasing diet of more

so when the lifeline snapped and she jumped into the whirlpool i just watched her as she spun farther and farther away

tossed a rose into the wake and slipped off the wetsuit and flippers and piloted the vessel straight into the rocks of inevitability