we smiled like liars, all tragedy and too many teeth and lieslieslies.
we wore dangerous eyes and lived on the wrong side of wild, keeping chance in a chokehold and luck as an afterthought.
we bit our lips and wasted rusting penny kisses in cold hotel rooms, choked hearts to death with broken ribcages and played music on ugly wristbone keys.

i strangled you with umbilical cords and statistics and
why did i do this
why did i do this
why did i do this
rhetorical questions are brutal.

you cut roads through me and asked me not to cry, and i built cities out of the empty streets.
there were no words left to say, and we breathed long distance frequencies and ocean static.
"this is how dying sounds," i told you, but there was no answer behind empty phone calls.

they say that love is not a game, but we lost anyway.