First Love Second Skin

I wanted to write something about a relationship that feels parasitic and I also wanted to touch on the idea that when we first start to love it can be addictive and change us into something grotesque

My first love came with a second skin,

Free of charge and choice.

It came to me in the 11th hour of my youth

A thirst so strong, in my ignorance,

I almost drowned to quench it.

I found us in rooms of red,

A color she prefers

We saw you through a veil

I offered your body up to her.

She normally lurked in shallow pools beneath the skin

And she brought me with her

She drowned me

Unzipped me.

I came from the water

These legs still learning,

These arms pulling at the cords,

That wished to whisper me back to the waves

And against all better judgment

I went in search of what I needed.

Screams of a voice, raw and thrashing about for air,

Washed out the whispers

Forgive me, I’m new at this

I wrapped myself up in that veil

We bathed in that Red, you and I

Through the veil, I feel you

Through it I see you

In the Red I found you

I crack open your bones to feast on the silent faith you hold in your reflection

Who placed it there?

What lackadaisical creator passed over me

Endowing me with nothing but the sense,

That every voice, pointed and hushed, carries my name.

What brings me to reap you of it

A taste you can't imagine

My apologies if like a dog, unfed, my cuts aren't clean

These hands are still new and crude

And nothing had dulled these teeth

I’m sorry if I take a vein to many

For you see, you would have been a more welcomed visitor at my birth-

In the eyes of every man I'm shackled to.

I know it's in their somewhere, what you have

So I tear and shred

Because it's all I'm really looking for

I hold your eyes in my palm

I wash them down with sips of you

So I may taste a glimpse of myself.

You didn't see it coming

Through your eyes alone, I saw my beauty

They are my choice of Doll

And you, a valley I’m willing to bury myself in.

It’s a shame you couldn't do me such a kindness

For now when I turn to meet my image

I see what you left me

My mouth, hollow,

Because the sweet things I whispered to your skin,

Had been too spaced out

And in your search for more

Your teeth stole my tongue.

I see bruises up my thighs

And my lungs were popped

Because you knew what I needed,

How much I needed and how much I wanted.

A taste I can't imagine

A love between things like us,

Is destruction-

Mutually assured

So as you float up and I sink ever deeper,

With a hole in my chest

Remember how you refused to finish your meal.

You left me nothing but bone,

And a heart marked by teeth to weak to finish it

Or perhaps too cruel.

Part of me likes to think,

That we were never really monsters

We were only boys,

Ignorant to the power we gained by succumbing to a love like ours

And the weaknesses that would linger, for a time too shameful to admit.

And I think that might be worse

Oh first love, how do I shed this second skin

She scares me so.

Author's Note

Any and all feedback is welcome

Reviews

[Alice]

Really love this poem, certainly better than most others on here. The grammar could do with some touching up but it didn’t ruin the read for me :]