i’m not locked inside w/ beauty like you

i’m locked inside w/ gratis maggot lap dances from all my dead loves

i’m locked inside w/ a dozen cherries of cigarettes punched out upon the lid of my soul’s eye

i’m locked inside w/ my boxcutter-slashed  angel weeping every which way from 10,000 screaming mouths

i’m locked inside w/ my father’s white knuckles around an incoming bayonet w/ “for my boy” etched in its blade

i’m locked inside w/ a stream of tears whose roots stretch into the earth w/ the worms

i’m locked inside w/ my traumatized sunflowers whose crowns suffer flashbacks of hell

i’m locked inside w/ demons whose horns carve “you can’t handle shit” across my inner skull every day

i’m locked inside zipped up in a body bag w/ in another body bag w/ in yet another body bag, weeping in a terrible trifecta

i’m locked inside w/ the heavy wheels of my mother’s deathbed running up & down my arms

i’m locked inside w/ busted knuckles shuffling a deck of toe tags ready to play a deadly game of solitaire

i’m locked inside w/ boyhood rainbows that morphed into the undertaker’s tape measure

i’m locked inside w/ a tourniquet-turned-noose

i’m locked inside w/ a halo of long black splinters

i’m locked inside w/ a morgue drawer core that never seems to thaw

i’m locked inside w/ zig zag paper cuts across the wincing windows of my soul

i’m locked inside w/ bloody hand prints covering the walls from nights i tried to claw myself back to the stars

i’m locked inside w/ the lump in my throat that kicks the shit out of my smile

i’m locked inside w/ my umbilical like a sick snake snickering from the shelf at my collapsed will

i’m locked inside w/ ticking crack-ups stitched beneath the skin of my wrists

i’m locked inside w/ the butterfly drawn & quartered behind my trembling temples

i’m locked inside snorting the chalk outline of my own shape at the center of the taped off room & choking on my own ghost

i’m locked inside w/ a bleeding bull slumped at my soles that no longer chases death over the hills