How can you smile with your lips  wrapped around a loaded gun?

How can you smile with your lips
wrapped around a loaded gun?

We’ve been staring down the barrel all our lives
flirting with the click of death just to feel alive
we’re broken and bruised and there’s not enough crazy glue
to go around and re-stick the pieces of the people we used to be

Your eyes are a mirror to my own caged misery
and I love you all the more for your pain
for the dysfunctional honesty that flows
like last breathes between us

You smile like a broken vase that I want to fill with flowers
do you remember the time…?
it was all easy then

It’s been a while since we were okay
and me, I’m still trying to find a way out of the abyss
to somewhere where the sunsets smile back
and don’t herald the darkness like a reverse dawn

While you’re still playing chicken on the highway
anything just to feel alive
loading the gun again
with a dead eye smile as you lift it to your mouth
and click off the safety

And I wonder if you’d ever pull the trigger
despite your cowardly confessions
and I watch with a glass jar heart
as you lick the tip and smile in a way
that’s almost half-way normal
thinking…

how can you smile with your lips
wrapped around a loaded gun?

There’s got to be something better than this

© Indie Adams 2012