Poetry by Vanessa Matic
Photos by Austin Roque
What is beauty? Have they not seen you broken under the lights of this madness. Your skin like magic, a thousand glitter dreams. Chased to the lips of strangers, we become star-light. I count love, endlessly; A disease I wish to die by. So fill me with your magic like a last kiss and do not be gentle tonight. There’s so much subtle chaos, the fights keep breaking out; Everyone is angry. They keep trying to hold hands and put their arms around longer dreams. But what about the hours after when it is so silent you can only hear a heartbeat if it is near you. And I put my hands around you it’s bigger than holding myself in or the world. All these people passing by and loving and pretending I don’t know truth or lie, I smoke a cigarette and get by. I love you all the way when you smile truly and you grow wilder, we’re free I let myself die for happiness that is what life is. You get cold in your sleep and I’m there when you weep. All the love songs and poems won’t be enough but I’ll try to put us in the details within my myths and romance the burnt out hearts where you touch my spine and feel my heart like a razor blade. What is home anyway but our shadows touching, a faith is heat, love is so much more than what we see and I try to let you use me selfishly. So when you are deeper I let everything go to think of the rainfall when we are closer than skin and soul. I put my skin like a second skin on you I’m a snake inside your blues; tell me what you’re willing to do. What friends? And what clue? I let the rain wash my love away, listening to Steve Jones pleasure and pain you can always take the storm. I’m always quiet, I’m always right on my own. Yeah I know what to do because when the moment is bruising everyone will lose. The world always burns like kerosene after a cigarette and I have zero time for cheap regrets. We could be louder than the dream, you could take your time and make-believe I’m joking inside our maniac depressions leave us choking. With my 23 un-read messages because none of them are you. Oh and I got to see you one last time before we drown. So you can kiss me like poison and tell me what it means to be down. And I don’t ever live today like I do tomorrow so I can trade the key of sorrow. I’m a wild side baby with a bad temper when I get mean with a touch of magic that will make your heart bleed. As we slow dance in the rain like strangers, and my new dress is a ghost. With your eyes always dreaming and a gun by my side, I think I like you the most. I wait for the abduction, your long fingers that reach into sweet venom a throat of a snake. A kiss is but a dream we live in. I forget about war when I’m dying with you. And all currency is transparent, you’re eyes twice glossy with no fears; am I a lover now? We belong in better truths that won’t hurt us the way we decide to lie and believe. Take me somewhere and leave me there. I want to go to the beach when the sun is silver-gray. Be delicate buy flowers with love, I say but they keep thinking it’s a bad joke. A dark humor comedy made of romantic doom, oh but if you kiss like midnight but never stay it means nothing anyway. Time for a dance, I took a loop of roses just to try my chance. Watch them glitter and the petals burn from my petroleum blues, there’s always a little less love for you’s. And then you see them ready to go with lipstick stains, a few spilled out daisy brains; A trail on the hollywood stars that go to the wild west hey but it’s no good to second guess what’s a heartbeat in a chest. Arched her back, start to sway and then thunder comes just another day. And what we thought was love, a broken mess; I set a fire burning calling you in the dead of night. When your skin stretches like trembling orchards I touch you with romance, to lick the scent of you a coldness of silver moon. Each time I hold you closer than magic something that tears me apart like the shadow wind roaming telling me no one has a heart. We were running around sunset they all get wet, spent, and then bent. Another holiday they think they can wipe the pain like a smear just to be slept away. You can find the wild child now numbed, one flew over the cuckoos nest. MKUltra just a dream, and the satellites call love; They tell you you are going under, shot with plutonium and fear. Death is just a memory, they brought out to call a nightmare. The day you wished you died but survived half mutated and still fighting, a messiah of rage collected under your fears raped each strand of your indulgence. What is it this time? The money’s gone, what is currency? Take of your murder leprosy, but you won’t give that to the youth. Just a semi subsided ultra-violence where the middle thinks there still is rules. They just take our souls to confuse, and you can never hold onto the dreams as we tried to live the same one together and wake up to really dream. You thought hand-holding was enough and you gave it to everyone that spent time burning. I ran down the streets with heart aches that remind me of you; No photos please, shit face, pretty face when we’re cruising down the filth of your soul and all you care about is the moment no one will remember and the photos won’t be saved. They’re all light birds now they burn like disease, they say we’re glamorous when we gamble. I sold my soul to the devil you said love was not true.”Love is pink I think” she says but I comb my hair, I cut you out. A million strangers that will make us delay that something is better another day. I don’t know how some people can go out almost every night, it must be unhappiness. You call me to say you miss me and I don’t believe it’s true anymore. Your eyes just become black and I see only the back of your head I’m not even in your moment we are separately moving in different directions. You try to call my name but it sounds like a bad instrumental and all the reasons I felt sentimental blur like a thousand diamonds in a fiery sea; Still I want you to come back to me in some bad dream. I don’t miss it anywhere like I miss the heaven when I ride you. I always want to hold my love closer than the cuts and bruises that sing with pain. Excited to see you, need to be near you. Are those stars in the sky or the reason that you cry. Feeling on our scars this must be really ours. Love is just a name you call when you are ready to take the fall. Yet it seems we both are similar, need love to keep us straight yet what is familiar? But as the night steps into space we take back our death dance; till tears just turn to glitter, you taste just like hate. With your arms wrapped around me, the sky is falling down. The clouds are on fire I love that there’s no more sun. When the night comes it finds me with lovers sweet wishes crawlin’ in my heart. Piece by piece I break it, piece by piece till there’s nothing left to part. I kiss you like a holiday wishing you would stay, but by now I know we’re the same; Nothing ever changes for the messed up ones. Barbed wire kisses, I’ll treat you nasty till all your love moves right past me. We find out too much, and then it burns off touch. When your demons are closer desires I burn inside of our silhouette made of icy fires. You say you don’t know where to go and where do we belong but nowhere babe? With all the flesh that can’t hold us and the wise words that can’t mold us. What’s to save? We cry gasoline and nothing changes. We’re just living to die by sins I take mine and put a message in. I’m like the crow by your window give me your secrets, your eyes my eyes and my death your love in disguise.
