Nothing lasts forever except yesterday

Dance, dance your decay
All the while, unknowing you're led astray
Sleep, sleep through your woe
While your voice slowly withers and melts away

Sing, sing unto me, the pleasure and pain
Reveal to me the reasons my love's not in vain

- Ghosts are burning the edge of my vision.

I can feel the way they crowd and jumble, the way their fingers are pulling sticky fingers against my sanity and dragging me further and further into the rabbit hole of my insecurity. I can see them in the shadows at the base of my eyelids and feel their voices in the spaces between my vertebrae. They call me when I'm awake and they scream when I'm asleep and I claw at my face and I pull at my skin, but they burrow deeper and deeper still.

They quiet and stagnate, yet I can feel them in the dust that my feet unsettle as I walk forward. Their faces are persistent and their mouths gaping open with the scent of decay bound like a cord around their flapping tongues. They are silent and knowing, touching my inner demons with a violating hand. they nod, they smile; they are smug. I hate them for this. They see the way my heart quivers in my chest and they stroke the trembling bones that it clacks against. They crack the silence and whisper, tell me of sweaty nights and whispered words of passion. They tell me of possessive fingers and pleading hips, and murmured words of forever in the arch where throat kisses sloping shoulder. They tell me of how stars burned for them like midnight oil, how passion arched over arched spines and the way they made pulses thicken and slow. how desires that deep may sail where they please, but always return to where they anchored first.

They tell me that nothing lasts forever except yesterday.

And this is when I run, and scramble, and fall to scraped-up knees and yet do not stop. This is when I dive into vehicle entrenched in dust and spin rubber against asphalt. The ghosts, they pound against my windows and they scream in time with the wind. My pulse hammers and the wheel leaps in my hand. My palms are slick with fear, my back drenched with doubt. I break my mirrors, I blow my speakers, I run from them, but I am nothing but a moth in a hurricane; passing headlights look like fallen stars. I am entranced by their light. Death looks like constellations hovering above the two-lane highway. They are in my lane, I am in theirs. Ghosts are whipping around my fenders and seeping under my hood. They are screaming, but it's my throat that is raw.

[falling stars taste like metal on my tongue; passing galaxies feel like shattered shrapnel in my chest. i am laying on the asphalt next to my burning car and the chipped-paint meteorite. they are touching my cheek, my hand, the hole gaping by my sternum, they are brushing matted hair from my face. i can see their mouths moving, i can see their eyes rolling back into their heads, i can see their bones jutting through their flesh. i see the whites of their eyes and the past replayed in static. i see projections that i cannot outrun in the chapped skin of their lips. i am screaming; i can't stop screaming.]