These Empty Fortresses

Just us. The skull with its skin peeled down to the lips. Scapels everywhere cutting blind. Hearts still beating from inside open ribcages. As the monitor testifies. Preaches even. That what thoughts once were alive in there, do still exist.

If only I still had those old wings. If only people ever lived to become who they think they are.

Then all poets would be useless. And drugs no addiction at all. Just one more stripe of color in the sky as it decides when to rain next.

Like I always told you, we're not here to please each other. Nor ourselves. We're alive because we want something much harder to find.

I guess I should've given you up a long time ago. But I never could stand to think of you as alone.

Your kite without a string battling the current. Consenting to lose oneself I can abide. But not being stricken. Lost.

There are enough balloons for all who need them. Because your pain means nothing to me. It is spoken in a foreign language. I can feel it, but I don't understand what it's saying.

I never have.

I wonder what drug it would take to translate.

And what then they might say.

Do they have breath. Would they echo.

As I stand at the end of this corridor and wait for them to reach. Wherever it is they hope to go.

The pleasantries of humanity aside. It all seems so futile. Lost in ourselves. Looking to others for an exit.