You Suck

You suck me dry. I have had my insides pulled out and trampled upon, I have been picked apart by long black beaks. I have been gazed upon with lust and jealousy and wanting and disdain, and I have had everything that I am exposed from the inside out.

I have learned to love, felt devotion and passion and wanton abandon, and have had it pulled out of me slowly and painfully and a piece at a time like the spines of a cactus, until there is nothing left but the tiny little holes that ooze pain and want and need. The things that brought me joy and freedom and peace now fill me with dread and gloom and emptiness.

I have brought you gifts, offered the best parts of myself freely and without question. I give and I am open and warm and welcoming, I am embracing and exposed, without secrets. And for that I am played like a mariachi’s guitar, dragged along in a dirty suitcase along endless, nameless roads, from fine restaurants to filthy whorehouses, my strings pulled and twisted until they can offer up no music, they snap like brittle tree branches and are torn from their instrument and cast into a corner to be overlooked, stepped upon, until they shrivel and fray and are gone.

I am standing alone in the middle of a long dusty highway with nothing visible in either direction, the hot wind blowing up my nose so I can’t breathe. There is no sweat, there are no tears. I am empty and vacant and pointless, and I have been sucked dry.