The Way the World Works

Selling yourself just to figure out who you are
You're lost between the pictures of paintings,
And none of them are real; nothing's real here except for the number of breaths you take
Nothing is real except the knobs of your spine, or the hollows in your hipbones.
You're pushing yourself on an empty tank, but there's nothing to fill you with
Nothing to curb the unquenchable desire of being whole
But you only know empty, you only have ever known empty
Like the sound the wind makes as it passes through the leaves
Or the way the young mother's pocket doesn't jingle when her child tugs on it
You don't know if being empty is a bad thing
But empty is all that you know
So you walk across the bones of the owls and you count their vertebrae
And you're walking so lightly that you're almost floating, you might be floating
And nothing is going to be the same because this minute is different from the last
The cyanide drips off of your lips and you kissed me, I know you kissed me,
You can't take it back once it happened because it happened
Because that minute is over and we're not getting it back but it happened
Your lips were leaking poison and I lapped it up greedily
As if I could maybe hold onto it for a while and fill up your empty when you needed it
But you're too broken now and the owl bones are crushed
The knobs of your spine are contorted and I can't press against your hipbones anymore
Because you sliced me open and made a spectacle out of me
And it happened again, it happened again but with me this time
I'm selling myself just to figure out who I am because I'm running on empty
And I thought I knew who I was
But you took that from me, too.