Masks.
It was all a bit less than rose stems with teeth marks.
Alice in August. Disheveled, she lapped through afternoon snifters and flasks.
Vodka would splash on her lips from the glass while perusing her different masks;
there was diffident, crass, flippant, or dismissive with just a smidge of militant acts.
She would flip through her stash, biting her lip in the mirror until it would match
her outfit in the glass. She always picked the maroon lipstick with just a dash of base
since neither seemed to clash with any of her personas’ collective black malaise.
Eclectic, while Flea slapped the bass she pre-gamed with pot in fractioned eighths,
which lead her to machinate on her pitfalls, on her sprawling lack of faith,
how
‘if you don’t stop you don’t withdrawal’, tonight’s party starting just after eight,
and how she tried to recall exactly how her dad touched her clit when she masturbates.
Simply passing the time, this Saturday, recollecting her most prized underachievements,
waiting for the call. Waiting on the last soiree for this summer’s bereavement,
thumbing her attention scars under her sweater when tension calls. Numb to the feeling
as her phone hummed, eventually succumbed to the ringing.
-
Alice is offered. One little tab, a Technicolor sweet tart.
‘Burning the candle at both ends?
Don’t be a sweetheart. After this it’s all wine and rose stems with teeth marks.
Don’t be a drag.’ The party is in its autumn. The once present haze, afloat,
is just a dull sting on the nostrils now. Enough that a nubile would be made to choke
but its secondhand to this apostate crowd.
‘Your nerves are repressive.
Just take it.’ The circle of five are sedated, speaking tripped out cursory lessons
like it’s cursive. “Alice, are you afraid?” said so perversely it’s prescient.
“Of course not.” So she’s handed the acid. Five glares, a moment.
Minutes pass as it's on her tongue. Euphoria bypassed. Its serotonin;
it’s a different kind of numb, it’s bare aloneness,
It’s
‘Alice, in chains. As a carcass, her body of cross thatched lattice,
with synapses aflame. Tossed around, lost, aloft in a dark black madness,
and all that is pain. Where visage’s waft bare boned, unspooling aura
around her raggedy Anne frame, brittle and soft, for humored horror
in a tableau devoid, a broodish noir. It’s a ghoul’s haunted lilt at night,
a thousand screams but her own, with her lips sewn tight
and eyes wide shut. It’s the shuttering creep, the floating touch on her cheek.
Barren nostalgia of her father’s shuffling feet.
It’s kill on sight. Every fear under the sheets brought to light, a fever.
Her soul on ice tethered to the chill of all fright, measured and metered.
It’s the realization of blight. Soaking. The loss of all features,
the muffled “Why?”, wading through ether.’
-
Alice, in bed. Recovering from the path she’d gone, the awkward pause as she left
the party, made up of scoffs and guffaws. What was once halcyon’s now bereft.
Kleenex box at her head. Self-medicated, the induced results that she felt;
hands on her face, and as always she couldn’t find the pulse in her pelt.
Lost in her thought, another road preferably less travelled, taken.
‘These are the cards you were dealt’/
‘Fuck that, your mind is a playpen’
The masks would bask in battle back and forth, as she’d lay still, lost in time,
with one more mistake, one more mask, to be haunted by.