Green-eyed monsters

They always come at night, silently,

silently.

Slipping effortlessly into your skin,

oil down the sides of a glass bowl,

until it sets. Sharp fingers sinking between your ribs

digging into your closed eyes, scraping into the soft walls of your stomach.

And that's when you feel it clawing slowly down your spine, when you lose control of your consciousness and surrender it to the latent desire,

to the coldest, darkest corner of the night.

And you feel it. Slender hands gripped carefully around her neck. And all you really want to do is to tear it off

the flaxen ocean on her scalp,

the pale, freckled skin as bright as the full moon. And all you want to do is

strip flesh to bone and bone to ash and ash to dust

sinking to the bottom of the Marianas,

until there's nothing left for his breath to graze night after night

except your own, of course.

Nothing left for his hands to slide over, nothing left to satiate the hunger of an animal

that you want more than anything to cage up, to make suffer.

Until you wake up in a violent jolt,

all the anger, desire, bitter rain that no longer falls from grieving skies

mixed in with the cold sweat seeping from your pores.