Composition

It is midnight on a Sunday night and my fingernails are scratching in defeatism, peeling the purity of twenty-something skin away until balls of dead cells collect - a by-product of insomniac listlessness.

Copper tinged droplets slide down grooves and the simple movement yields results, like a dose of air freshener to the eyes. I break capillaries as numbers fall from my dry iced eyes. They are aflutter now, peeled away scales now obeying gravity. It makes me forget that there are laws I can't change with my fleshed out skeleton. Anatomy lessons scrape my clavicle like heartache, my sternum bares the brunt of relentless taps and both shoulder blades dip dangerously low, out of tune and time.

It is 12:12am and I wonder how blunt instruments can commit so much murder when we could all peel ourselves to death. We aren't onions or cookie dough. I am a single celled organism with a circle of skin around me to prove it. No one is two-faced, they're just confused.

And finally I realise, this is me on crack - not white powder or dirty pipes but calcium withdrawal. This is my brittle bones going on strike with brutality and pressing their skewered surfaces out. We have the scars to prove it; they just aren't visible yet.