Petting.

I drag it round on it’s belly. The skin wears so thin, I think it’s guts’ll split open any second,
And they’ll catch me. Prosecute, as they do, without hearing me out.

It is my circus act - three eyes, blind / 6 hands that can juggle but can’t write a word/ and one tongue with 30 flavours of love wet on it’s palette and not a single taste bud.

It’ll strip for you, if that’s what you want. Drops it flesh with such ease, you’ll see; it does not bloom like a flower as cliches want you to believe. Rather, it explodes, it ignites; has the life expectancy of a matchstick and is just as brittle.
It has the potential to obliterate if someone were to use it right.

And it’ll sing for you. Rib cage skiffle; ever heard the larynx grated through it’s own jaws? Choked up. A melody unheard of; catchy little number. A bile that rises from the silent masses of the mind and exhumes itself, decays the teeth as bulimia. The suffering wretch. Soul food.

I keep it close to me. Occasionally I let down my guard, and it pokes it’s awkward, splendid head out from under my breast. People scruff it up. People only want to pet it but I worry where else their fingers have been,

And what they could be passing on,

I wonder where my pet has been lately; there are hours that I lose myself. That I wake up with corner pieces half chewed and with someone else’s oversized pieces shoved awkwardly in.
I wonder what it does at these times. I wonder what it thinks. I wonder if it hates me and cavorts with all the mongrels of the area and tells them all my secrets in vengeance.

I wonder how much it knows and isn’t telling me.

And these people - these sticky fingered, filthy people who so eagerly scrape at its scalp and delight in it’s tricks and it’s downfall and the measly rations it lives off.

I wonder if my pet passes a little something on to them,
Whether she infects the ink in the next poem they pen
Or lays heavy on the strings of the next song they tear their fingers open with,

Or clambers up their lovers thigh and ends up as a romantic defecation,

That stains every dedication and sentiment,

And spells out my name in spineless, silent, stink.