Black is the color of my true love's heart.

I come out of my own background as a cancer research scientist, one who has worked with reproductive problems--birth defects, still births, spontaneous abortions, so-called jellyfish babies in the Marshall islands--these are hyditetiform [sp?] molds; they are blighted pregnancies; it is fetal material that becomes a tumor instead of a baby. It never develops. It's a runaway growth in a woman's uterus which is delivered after seven or eight months-- just a living blob of tissue. Women had never seen such things before.
(source:alt.immunology, author unknown)

after six months, i calmed down enough to have my hands unstrapped. the brain fever has not left me totally undamaged; sometimes i slip up and order 'satan pot pies' in my favourite restaurant.

the last nebulae of my relationship slip through fingers clasped white as bone. my eyelids machine-gunning in perverse accompaniment to the tinny voice in my head that screams over and over "deposit twenty-five centavos for the next 3 minutes".

i close my eyes and think of the venus fly by. the black ice dagger fucks my brain as my vision pinpoints and i rollover into that slow fade to black.

i still replay the sudden crack of my arm into the cold adobe wall above my bed. clean fracture don't tell my heart.

my body recoils and my stomach churns and churns and i swallow down bile as my screams shatter the window into frozen ice shapes each more fiendish than the last. yellow-green snot seeps into my mouth giving contrast to the copper taint of my bleeding tipless tongue.