Vulture

The word kindness pressed between your lips like a butterfly pressed between two plates of glass. A corpse on display whose bright colours always keep formaldehyde from your cigarette, your parted lips: an open casket.

You often carried death in your mouth.

You’re the vulture at the party, circling on the outside, one eye on the bones of one car crash, the other on the next, with a knack for scraping the bottom of the pack those runts destined to lose themselves.

Scrub up well skinny meat-free leather jeans, wash your skin sharpen your beak pluck your feathers clean. From the back of your throat, you’d distend an old fishing line you’d hover over the young old boys at the bar waiting for a nibble.

Some nights, the boys found younger models first with flesh as soft as theirs, but you never took a drink out of thirst. Who even cares? You’re used to eating last, and these runts make the perfect dinner date, by the end of the night, you’re sure to get a bite. Open up to your bedroom looks like there’s been a food-fight, don’t worry your hairless head, no one notices a few stained sheets after you’ve painted the whole town red.

© Josh Lonsdale