the words came tumbling

The words came exploding out of skin, hot and cold and sewn-together, some of them scarred or rotted over with rust. They were dark and light and forgotten, illuminating one another with the faint glow of the kisses that had been bestowed upon them. The flesh vomited words, throwing them out into the sky to be caught by those who came to collect them, men in white suits with dapper silk ties and silver hats, who walked around trying to convince everybody that they weren't lying in the first place.

They fought their way out, words covered in margarine from their journey to the frying pan, and dripping hot fat as they made their way out from beneath the bacon wedges. They were grilled, basted and tortured, juicy drippings straight off the rack allowing a kind of wine-and-turkey smell to penetrate the house. The words kept right on coming, spewing forth as though out of a sewer, forgetting themselves in their anxiety, tripping over one another as they tried to see the pretty little girl in the white dress with the blue flower in her hair.

I saw the words; they sunk into my skin. I looked at them, scarcely there, transparent, translucent, within the blue blood that ran in my veins. They swam, forgotten, beneath the opaque veins and blood vessels, bursting into being like an aneurysm, struggling to survive like a a man with smoker's lung trying to breathe. Eventually, they choked me to death. But first came my little boy and the effervescent words hanging on the edge of his spangled dress, smoky, acrid, a little too sweet: "Have you got a cigarette?"