You've got eyes like a fever, red and round. You've been laying your head on every pillow in town. Is there a sweetheart in the city that you leave late to visit? You bring her boquets of cigarettes and bottles of gin. What a prize, what a lover, she's the standard for her sex. Her heart's pure, her tongue's clean, she blushes when she on her knees.

And late at night, when the shades are low, you dress each other up like paperdolls and paint your lips with cream. Through the scaffolding of crackled plaster, the silverfish swarm like magnets to the sounds of your labored breathing. With hearts and limbs entangled, you sleep the day away.

You're a shock monger, she's a fucking champ at twisting your lips to say "yes". You'll make medals of anything she leaves you, red fingernail clippings and spent Camel Lights. She's cutting your heart; making ribbons to tie up your hands once you realize you haven't been using them well.

Oh, you'll try to put it right, but it will be disappointing in nature. You'll take a fist to the jaw, a knee to the chest. And when your coughing up blood and fluid from your lungs, you'll tell her she's beautiful as she steps off your cheek.

She's the knot in your stomach that aches in its acid, the ulcer, the cancer, the burn of decay. You swore you'd swallow her love like a chocolate. She gave to you, instead, a clever coal. Now you're turning it round and round in your guts, trying to digest the sharpness of your remorse. Growling and scraping you'll make the stone heart she gave you into another treasured momento, a terrible pearl.