Neon Chains

Ink seeps beneath skin like secrets under wet sheets.
The city drones in half-tempo—(subway shakes underground)
Bodies laid out like an archive under lamps. (alley shadows)
Each bears codes no longer legal to speak.
A woman’s shoulder—cold under halogen:
black script curving where her clavicle dips—
“Sing me back before I was touched.”
He traces it with a penlight,
reads melody through heat and ache.
A man’s ribcage under white glare:
notes rising from the wound like smoke rings,
staff shattered where the bullet went in 
He sings it anyway—
a hymn of exit wounds on wet pavement.
A dancer’s thigh, pale under sodium light:
lines of treble clef and scar tissue.
She moves, and (the groove) shifts key.
Sweat runs down his face like punctuation.
The city leans closer to listen.
In a backroom, no mirrors or windows,
two bodies laid close, ink to ink—
stories overwriting stories,
ink translates through color friction.
Last kiss: decoder ring.
Lips frozen in fiction.
He—what’s left of him—
bags these fragments into silence.
A score of flesh and violence.
No staves. No bars. No pulse.
Later, in the wet dawn,
he peels a phrase, a tat on his wrist—
bass line, forgotten ink, raised by heat:
“You can’t find what never left.”
Their stories whisper through him
like blood from a reopened scar.
Echoes out a cracked-open metal door,
where bloating bodies sleep off confession,
past the rain that claps a rhythm,
as the coroner pours the resin—
casting the wound in this asylum
And the city,
tired, wired, trembling,
through a cough, starts to sing

Got To Have It

Method Man