Struggling to smell the difference

between the perfume she wears behind her ears

-as you teethe at her quivering neck,

and the stench of the motel where you fuck like strangers

but later call it sex.

Where you forget whether it’s dusk or Dawn

and just remember, you forgot to call her.

Her throat opens wide

as the moans bleed into traffic horns,

police sirens; and mouths as filthy as their children

spit glass across the mattress

filled with eight naked body bags,

and of course you two-

squirming as if you knew what you were doing,

with his forearm pinning down her greasy hair,

she pretends she likes it rough

just because she thinks he does.

They rock back and forth like infants,

trying to remember what it was like

to sit in their mothers arms and feel

what love really is.

Without the crooked smiles that forgot

the difference between disgust and lust.

Just because it’s always so painful

that the corners of her mouth have earned to lift

with her skirt to make the tears look like his work

paying off,

without showing the shadow of a doubt

that is still trying to figure dusk from Dawn

so it can decide wither or not it’s time

to make an appearance.

If home is where the heart is,

tt makes sense they’d be so hollow.

They lock eyes-

but only because neither has the key

to what the other is really looking for.

They stare so deep that the room blurs.

Their pupils grow so wide that they swallow each other whole;

they stare so deep into each other’s eyes

that they just look right through to the other side,

and feel just as alone as they did

the day those dusty old vintage motel sheets

started to collide.

They’ve been fucking in the same rotten room

for so long that their standards for the outside too

are gone.

He’d of never known he climaxed

if he hadn’t fallen out of her broken spirit

and into the pages of the bible

that wasn’t even placed in room 12’s cracked nightstand.

It would have served no purpose

to the two who’d stoop so low as to continue spending

each other when knowing all along they were both

worthless.

So they smoke the broken roach clips,

left in the ashtray from the moment they noticed

-neither one of them even smoked.

They’ll make it routine and call it adventure

as the habit forms and the love becomes indentured

-two slaves wondering which is the master

as they both eat the leather

and clench their teeth reaching up towards the rafters.

She used to call for Jesus,

and now she calls for me

-she used to call for Jesus

but she never believed.

It’s just what she thought you’re supposed to do.

And we’ll keep fucking like we’re seizing today

while tomorrow giggles behind the curtains

and the night masturbates

in the room next to ours with his first date.

And I’ll keep telling this story in third person,

and I’m sure she’ll do the same.

Because we never loved, we lusted

without ever knowing the way.

We never trusted ourselves to get there,

so we stopped at a motel along the way.

With each stop we take,

we get a little closer

to getting further away.