Tell Me What Bleeds

Tell me what bleeds
breaks your heart open,
quietly,
slowly,
in the cadence of death.
When the storm inside your chest
breaks everything you ever knew to be good.

Glass shatters against the motel wall.
Blood splatters against the man who was tall.
He’d thrown the bottle first.
Then the ashtray.
Then you.
Into the wall,
into the floor,
into the kind of pain that doesn’t even make you scream anymore.

He called it a conversation.
Said it was your fault.
Said you made him do it.
His fist left a hole in the plaster.
His boot left one in you.
And still,
you didn’t cry.

You just fucking stood there,
tasting blood,
measuring the door.
Until he smiled,
picked up the knife,
and told you to drive.

You drove.
With the knife pressed against your throat
Cold steel.
All too real.
And he whispered: keep going.

So you did.

Through the backroads.
Through the dark.
Through nowhere and nothing,
and the long stretch of highway
where no one ever looks twice.

The phone was dead.
You were dying.
Inside first.
Then everywhere else.

You thought maybe the trees might open up,
might swallow you whole.
That maybe the road would curve into some kind of peace.
But peace was a fucking lie.

He sat behind you.
Breathing.
Smiling.
Waiting for your hands to shake.
But they didn’t.
Not yet.

You passed roadkill.
You stopped noticing.
There were too many broken things in the world to count.

You thought of Mary.
You thought of love.
You thought of how silence sometimes feels louder than screams.
You tasted blood again.
This time, it was yours.

You didn’t scream.
Not when the car spun.
Not when the tyre blew.
Not when his voice dropped to a whisper and said, This is it.

You didn’t scream.

The car hit the ditch.
Metal folded like paper.
You hit your head on the wheel,
the glass,
the thought of him still breathing.

Everything blurred.

You rolled from the wreck like something half-alive,
half-ghost.
Fell into the grass.
Cold.
Wet.
And alone.

Your body didn’t feel like yours.
You moved because pain told you to.
Because instinct hadn’t caught up to grief.
Your jaw throbbed where it had met his elbow.
Your ribs hummed like something cracked but unfinished.

Every part of you leaking.
Bruised, used, left to rot beside the fucking highway.
And still—you crawled.

Gravel bit into your knees.
Your palms shredded.
A whimper slipped out—ugly, wet, real.
You felt his breath behind you.
Close.
Too close.
But not moving.

Was he dead?
Unconscious?
Watching?
You didn’t dare look.
Because if he was smiling,
you wouldn’t survive it.

So you crawled farther,
into the dark,
into the dirt,
into anything that wasn’t him.

Beside you,
the kangaroo was already dead.
Its eyes open.
Its mouth twisted in the shape of a scream you never got to make.

And so you curled into it.
Into the blood.
Into the silence.
Into the nothing.

Tell me what bleeds?
You do.
But no one’s coming.
There are no streetlamps here.
Just headlights
approaching.
Passing.
Then gone.

And in the hush that follows,
you realise
You are the roadkill.
You are the forgotten.
You are the story they’ll never tell.

But the crows will.
They’ll tear it from your flesh,
ripped in ribbons across the gravel,
and scream it into the sky like a warning.

No name.
No mercy.
No shrine.

Just a stain on the bitumen.

Written, composed, and performed ©Samira Wyld 2025
A Wyld and Untamed Production 2025