You never wanted blood just a polished surface. A face that bent around your outline. A witness who'd describe the wound and call it coronation. You wanted clean hands, an alibi with a pulse. Someone else to carry the charge when the circuit finally smoked. Tell me who taught you to smile through clenched teeth, who stitched devotion into every threat. You speak in glances more than language, and somehow I still know every word. There's a frequency you run beneath the room. The glass on the shelf hums when you enter. Maybe we've circled this before same coordinates, different name on the door. Something underneath us keeps pressing upward. Rust through the floorboards. You called me beautiful machinery and I believed it long enough to break. And I know what you are. I feel it where the back teeth meet. So pull me under slowly. Count backwards from seven. Tell me the shaking is sacred, tell me the fever is working. I can hear the lock turn over. I can feel the room get small. If this is what passes for heaven, don't answer when I call. Come on then bring your private disasters. We'll build a kingdom from bad decisions and sleep beneath the collapsing eaves. You wear hostility like perfume. The perfect enemy. The kind that gets mistaken for salvation when the body forgets how to feel. Feed every wound a better story. Turn every bruise into a sacrament. Tonight we'll climb inside the wreckage and name each broken thing after ourselves. The lights distort around your silhouette. The walls begin agreeing with you. Go deeper. I can still remember my name. Flood every channel till the baseline drops. Let the wanting run on its own. Something in the ventilation smells like you. The mirrors tilt toward your face. If this is what passes for heaven, I don't need saving anyway. Mascara smeared across the hotel mirror. Warning labels folded into paper birds. White streaks on a marble countertop. Sirens somewhere beyond the balcony glass. Television prophets argue with the ceiling. Streetlamps multiply into watching eyes. A silver cup rolls under the bedframe. Something dark spills across designer sheets. Everybody's laughing too loudly. Nobody remembers why. Take everything that still has our fingerprints. Burn the map. Miss every exit. In your garden of erased names, the water tastes like sleep. In your garden of erased names, nobody asks where we went. In your garden of erased names, the photographs lose their faces. In your garden of erased names, I finally stop introducing myself. I AM NOT WHAT YOU MADE OF ME. I kept the teeth. I kept the scars. I kept the evidence. You can keep the shrine. I AM NOT WHAT YOU MADE OF ME. Maybe I wanted absolution too. Maybe I needed a ladder built from wreckage. Maybe every accusation landed clean because my fingerprints were underneath them. You wanted reflection. I wanted elevation. We traded pieces until neither of us could remember the original shape. But I've walked out with what I came to reclaim. And I'm not turning back to check the damage. You pulled me under slowly. You called the damage holy. Every warning wore your lipstick. Every exit wore your smile. I heard the lock turn over one last time. I left your garden of erased names. I watched the room collapse. And heaven lost its leverage the moment I stopped looking back. In your garden of erased names... I still hear it calling. In your garden of erased names... I almost disappear. In your garden of erased names... No I almost disappear.
