Crimson-Studded Hideaways.

Don't let them get me.
That's what'd Ryan always whisper to me, curling behind the wine-doused quilts covering his frail frame.

As always, he'd be sitting on the couch, holding onto a single pillow coddled to his chest, eyes frozen still on the TV screen, grasping every blast of sound and color it'd spew upon his big browns.
He was too young to be seeing such things; blatant bloodshed, sand-soaked fleshless corpses and five penny worth of deducted souls.

He was watching the world spin and spit out the souls it created; all behind mute screams and walls of dense tears. Too much pressure on that virgin mind of his; deflowering the younglings is the toughest part of the process...

The world was too mean, too evil, too... candid to him.

Sex, drugs, violence, love on TV.... All were too brutal for his eyes to handle.

After it all gets dark, after the TV bolts halt, he'd head under that finely-woven cotton cave and hide. He'd hide away from the bad bad universe. Tauntingly, though, the bad bad world would chase him into his bankrupt nightmares, dancing on the tips of his fingers every time he's awake.
On every page, between every word and crushing bite of reality, those scenes buried themselves beneath the back of his tongue. In the words he'd swear, in the vile-minded thoughts he'd murmur, in the dirty sweet nothings he'd whisper to himself.
They all drowned in the black that is the ink of his pen, the pupil of his eyes. The screams of the starving young haunted him, all reminiscent in the sobs and moans leaving his mouth.

Then there was me.
Always there to help conceal him from the world, I strived to paint those browns with prominent rainbows of words and untruths. Not lies, untruths.
Lies are mean cold untruths you don't want to believe and insert into your uncorrupted heart. Untruths are tastefully decorated pretty lies that burst within the darkness of your screams and night; they burst with shades of blueberry blue, glazed cherry red and cotton-candy pink drenching all of the dried corpses posing at the front of your eyelids.

And that's what I gave him; cotton-candy pink and radiant clover-green untruths, just to block the explosions and sounds of ripping skin out of his ears.

Ryan was scared from the world; and he had every right to be. At the mere age of eighteen he realized that he hid behind those colors, those grim but equally vibrant drawings decorating his eyes along with these intricately woven lyrics from the sedated fingertips corroded by books and blueberry smothered untruths.

Thus he hid; behind bird-red and skeleton-silver eye-shadow and his lyrics he hides. I fed him all the lies I could, yet his innocent eyes could never get full. As much as he hated the world, he wanted to hear more lies and untruths about it; like there's justice, there's goodness and there are still some beating hearts out there that care.

Just like his want to change the world. Foolish childish dreams still polluted his mind.
Still.

Impure TV untruths told it will be okay; the world will fix itself someday.

Yet, there were questions flirting with those stay lost eyes of his. Would the world press too hard? Is it pressing too hard?
Would it break the threads of sanity twirling in the back of his mind? Would the madness spread across the world's smoky black strike him too if the braids of stringy malice-burnt lies slipped a noose around his milky throat?

The wine-doused blanket would steal him away from all those roaring monsters the world nurtured and held close.

Even when he had me, the world still scared him. Still frightened him with its smoky black orbs.
Tides of sin pledged to run his love-blinded eyes whenever I fed him more moist fresh untruths; brewed straight from the lie-cleansed pieces of my heart.
I love my innocent Ryan more than the tiresome piles of hypocrisy I indulged in everyday. The world couldn't get him unless my heart stopped beating, unless it was crushed and mutilated by those monsters called reality and truth.

The universe wasn't all contrite sun-dried saints; it wasn't roses and virgin kisses. Similar to our affection's fluctuation, it bit into his spine ice-cold to lactate on the fear that once over-spilt from his browns, fueled by the enraptured aura of my lies... my untruths; blueberry and clover-green soaked. Those untruths smeared his life, smeared his thoughts, even his body; they sunk into the bones; right to the marrow.

Under dusk-colored eyelids, he'd escape and see the lies seeping under the bells pounding in his ears and conjure the timid daymares out of their bubblegum pink.
Wonderfully abstract untruths often spilled from these lips, foolish lovely untruths; love, peace, it will all be alright.

Casket-like smiles, the TV smiled. Through the oceans of limbs, shredding hearts and gouged eyes, it grinned bloody lips and shushed him to believing all alright, all alright.
He'd hide under the wide-doused sheets more scared than ever, chasing away the bleeding pages and skin-deep worms with bites off of heated warm bodies and doses of picture-frail pulse.
I love to lick your wounds with these blunt claws, don't stop bleeding for me?

Oh, oh... goes his chocolate sweet lips, riddled with past hazelnut mistakes as his fingers thrash longing for the fragments of darkness coating the mean world's blood-scented facts.
Inept salted dry smiles would haunt his pen as it spilled those simple new words; lyrics only adorned with artless smiles and kerosene-flamed beauty; push, push away the sins and let the tragedies flood and welt the plain blanch pages.

Paper-cuts multiplied on his naive fingers like a lost illness, wretched and doomed to feed on the bleeding creativity of writers throughout the ages. Like insane lovesick adolescents, paper-cuts and ink splotches made love on his hands, on his palms, on his cheeks; sometimes watered-down navy blue would reach his neck in long connected streaks.

Seeing the ugly mean world, polished and bright in magazines, in opinions, and in combusting white smiles, repulsed him. He fought reality, dreamt against it, drank down cotton-candy pink and blueberry explosive blue just to run away and preserve the innocent and purity in his expanding little world.
He just wanted to capture every speck of unreal taste into this bubble he has created for himself under the wine-doused shades and ashes threads.

How can you not fall for such innocence? Such purity? Such naivety?

I watched him from afar as he hid within hose pages and caught the sparkle lying underneath his fingernails and sleeping within his untainted visions of the world trapped within his eyes.

How can't you?

Pitiful, pitiful, baby-lost innocence. Beautiful, pitiful, beautiful, pitiful, pitiful, beautiful baby-lost innocence.
His pretty little browns needed to hide from the world each time it penetrated his empty water-color ocean-calm bubble; translucent and revolved around the rusted tip of his pen and the singed spine of his purely pure sentiments; stained inky blue gracing his stuttering words, bound by the cowardly cardboard coating of his unblemished thoughts.

Thoughts of blank unwritten clouds, sparking his mind shut as flames of soft untruths paint layers of brutal brutal white over his eyes.

All my doings.
And I'll keep luring him back under; under the radiant untruths and crutch-like dead on-the-cheek kisses and strokes. Away from the blackened clouds of this world, surrounding the light airy powder fog of innocent whats and the raining invisible ink from his browns.
That's what love meant, wasn't it? Protecting each other's hearts from fire-red bruises and calloused heartswells from bleeding us dry?

Whispering tender sun-painted relief in his ear under those coral-red caves, I told him he's safe here; under the watery black and shifting still colors of every delicately poised heart. The stars and the seasons would screech if they knew how purely pure you are; how you wrap me around your finger; even if you didn't know it. Wrapped, wrapped, wrapped, and twisted all over your fragile fingers.

But I never touched him. Even when I was sweating lust, I never even touch his hidden skin, never caressed his back; just held to him to an eternity and kissed his cheeks.
It was that wretched... purity; the innocence dripping from his lashes and burnt-brown locks, tangled into strands of childish flare, accenting the immaculate luster lying within.

Septic glowering shame would look down on me each time I spilled my lies into the ears of this beautiful boy; every lie hewed slivers of burnished hope into his eyes, let him peek his little brown head from the scenes tarnishing the TV screen in anticipation, in hunger, in pitiful hope set ablaze by carcasses and wine-pained clots vomited upon the glass of the radiant screen.
So like clipped lips, lies bled red hot contusions anew with each severed flesh-colored gesture and combusting warm peach-orange untruths.

Give me an innocent crumbled heart so I can plaster it with untruths and vivid lies... That was my prayer every night before opportunity crashed aflame at my door, asking for warmth and fleeing insecurity. Like rain, chances dropped holding hearts and souls, infusing within and around my complexion, each begging for mind-throttling abuse upon their use emotions.
But I only wanted his.

New, gullible and freshly picked with apple-red blushing knuckles and polyester white fingers, shaking and twisting around quaking necks, molten under experienced lips. All that took to weave him into my ribcage was a subtle kiss upon his shivering fingers; just a single kiss to capture and entrap all this... all this innocence, this childish infatuation with pretty bright things; unidentified but still... pretty things.

He was such a pretty pretty boy; you just can't help to let him break you with baby-powder cognac-flavored fingers, kissing your lips and dragging out intoxicated stumbling smiles from them.

He'd fall apart when you touch him, out of love? Out of flagrant colors patently distorting his vision? Or just because of those ganoid macabre untruths?
Even though his dominant browns burned with lucid innocence, our kisses would get caught up in his larynx, profound and pearly-pink shy.
Just a bunch of piled bones sleeping in tired lying arms, away from wine-doused hideaways.

Brittle hipbones to liquid ribs.
Ribs that leaked scents and fragrant oils all over his skin; the scent of kisses; of falling in love and fields of blossoming bliss and distressed breaths.

He's just a hopeless desperate mess waiting for an equally desperate mess to look after him. Just a childish acrylic-paint charming mess all over the sheets and his fatigue fingers.
I was there to paint him with the honed tips of emblazoned shiny untruths; ready to use in my pocked and enslaved beneath my tongue for them to break open, crushing scenic bristled colors onto his lips just as he tautens; fighting brutal embryos of angsty reality, just roaming around the seething moats slipping from his eyes...
Drop by drop; mixing with the true berry blue over his neck.

It all came down to that stained smile; pretty and colorful; wax-skin clinging to confetti bruises that seeped into that peachy-pink smile.

Innocence and treachery were the faces of us; each surpassing the other in its own way to engulfing their ups and downs.

Right under those hideaway sheets and blood-stained screen projecting every horror onto the walls of his eyes; marble-strangled eyes, child-innocent eyes bleeding denial and disbelief.
It screamed murder to his eyes; poverty, skeleton children, ill-minded money hoarders, catalysts for Armageddon drizzled in all these acid-red rains swirling over hearts and pearl-white veins exploding and blinding saint eyes and painting Devils a delicious sinister blood-red dousing horns and tails trailing out of his pens.

Climbing angry green-sick veins hung in shambles around his hands and arms, screaming at cloud-light frozen consciences that tore up the world, eating children's hearts and singed dew-wrapped saviors, stripped down only to their cuticles and graying ankles.

So so innocent and pure he was, to the extent that it hurt.
All the pain, all the suffering, all the scars, all the illnesses of the world, displayed don the TV, in the papers, within books they hurt. They hurt too much.
It was as if they were all thrown on his paper-weak shoulders to carry.

Brittle little Ryan. All snug and shivering within those wine-doused sheets, spitting away the pains hurled from the cruel tongue of the world.

I love him, I do. He's all that I prayed and begged for molded into glittering browns and a pristine skeletal design. A pretty little Angel bused and bemused under my fingers and the world's hunger for bathing in bloody murder.

The world -every fucking inch of it- violated his thoughts again and again and again; I could see the stars behind his skull crack and cry, flashing tears dissolving to the sharp unblurred stream carving along his cheeks.

Finally, he hit the ceiling at the end; not because of my lies (the ones that couldn't save him no matter how bright and fragrant they were). It was because of his own words. The private lies he'd tell himself behind my ears.

The lies we call truth; the world's not worth it, life isn't worth the effort, love isn't worth the bleeding and it sure as hell won't throw roses and daises whenever you decide to love it and all that shit he could never pour into his lyrics. No, not something the world could sing.
He cracked when he spilt four words, four fucking words that would send you puking, crying and cussing at the same time. All jumbled on your throat between stomach-acid coated bits of yesterday's lunch:
"Can you kill me?"

And I didn't even think that this sweet little Angel knew a thing about death.