the funny thing is, you used to chew on glass chips in lieu of ice cubes and still had the audacity to look shocked when your gums tore and bled.          now you shred your flesh with the casual ferocity of a tigress at lunchtime. maybe your body arrives at the guillotine before the rest of you, your ribs kissing the scaffold, your brittle bones waiting to be gnawed at and snapped in half like a dog’s teething ring.         maybe you guide the tectonic plates of your skull through the lunette yourself and wait for the fissures to deepen to cracks, to split open and dissolve into a torrent of vermillion fading to gray.

this is a stranger shattering on the altar with you behind their flickering eyelids.         you look on vaguely, a detached observer in this twisted game: how far can one girl scatter?         the waxy sheen of hair follicles ripped from a reddening scalp         lips chapping, peeling, unraveling like a ribboning onion         grating your skin like cheese till you’ve built up a milky white film beneath         jagged, torn fingernails itching for more to destroy.

the funny thing is, you apologize to this body even as you crush it         like orange pulp beneath a callused heel. watch it bruise brilliantly, a glorious field of yellows and purples and greens.         you cry to a broken visage of yourself even as you hammer the mirror with your fists, letting it splinter into shards that pierce you like arrows. you beg this vessel for forgiveness even as you hurl it from rooftops and watch it fracture infinitely, a kaleidoscope of endings.         you are sorry, which is to say: you wish there were some way to implode without hurting yourself.