IS THIS LOVE? In her years away from me
she learned to make a red-coloured soup from stones, and yellow tea from dying hay. She offered me both when she finally let me find her, knowing I wouldn't drink such things. But I surprised her, drank the soup and tea down with a smile on my face, even asked for more of both. I was violently ill after, blood in my stool, teeth in my spit, but it was all worth it, seeing her face as she realised she had been wrong about me across the years neither of us would get back.
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TempleWalk, saunter, crawl, gallop
For what felt for hours long On a path of tent’cle Functionality bent To those bars Liszt had wrote And whose paths Escher would Ink in for viewing mass Until at a day’s drudge I arrived to floating Temple, Synagogue, Mosque Of cubes stacked snowy beige Of dungeon doors, iron bars Of rooms breaking logic And glyphs etched among walls That relate thousands like: ᄌ Ⰽ K ʞ Ж た Just to keep going for Miles past eye’s range they go Never revealing me Sagas, poems, stories, epics. The Illusions of Other Sides No matter how much I shower I still smell the dirt on me, the decay of my death hidden beneath the still strong sting of chemicals used to preserve me even as I wasted away, the satin inlay of my coffin like the scent of a child’s favourite toy, the wood, oak, I broke to rise, gathering multitudes of splinters in my stained skin that I cannot remove not matter how much I pull and drag at them with my cracked nails, shadows of clay deep beneath their paleness, as unmovable as the splinters, all to reclaim air, sunlight, life, my life, the life I never wanted to leave, the life I missed as I missed the breath in my lungs, little realizing at the time, though I would learn it soon enough, that the life I led, the life I was so eager to return to, never existed anywhere but in my head, and I had wasted a good death – a sudden passing in my sleep, a blessing when measured against the manifold ways a person can cease to be - for nothing.
Days have passed since I broke back into living, and, after discovering the life I knew was nothing more than imagination, all the places I searched that it was never a part of, I have spent that time showering every hour to remove the traces of death from me, even though I suspect that I will never remove that smell, its weight in the air as true and real as the life I sought was false and fake. And yet I will keep showering every hour of every day until the water runs dry or the rest of my body falls away and I am nothing but bone shining wetly, absent of all identity. I would clamber back down into the dirt, barricade myself back into my coffin – I returned to my grave soon after I saw the life I was seeking never existed, not wanting to be a dead man lost in a world with no place for me - but some disenfranchised soul, someone doomed to believe that any death is better than the worse days of a life, has taken it, covered himself up with all that loose dirt and broken wood, his earth-muffled cries of joy rising sluggishly towards the unfocused sky which looms mockingly above me. After KubabaNo man in the village stood among the scorpions.
But she arose like the sun from the node of the frozen night. Her story proceeded like parable, the sergeant opening the door to the Elysian Fields, then the escape from the desert’s turmeric tides. She leaves the village’s withered men and heads for the prophecy of the horizon. The stories of her father provided aid in the raft bed and blew through the seabirds and stars. How well the dead run with the sail. Eventually, on the third day she battled pure silence with a bronze hammer. The rain threw her a rope into the fire dark, and a house emerged on the reef of stones. But it did not delight. She needed a sliver of kiss to decorate the edge of the moon. She needed a god to appear as a word in the head. But the island kept its word. It kept it on the cusp of a visit from an enlightened being who is not possible, who is not home. The men of the treeline came together, and they saw the ascension of song and breath and medicine. They performed as they were commanded and claimed their understanding. They had brains to help them interpret their emotions. They scarred and healed, inked by the fog of happiness, and quickly spoke to the maze of infinite circumstance . . . in tongues. Frostbitten Thoughts Sitting at the table, before a frosty chessboard, my kindest memories and thoughts sit in a
cup beside me filling the room with a calming aroma of coffee. Incense burning a deep cherry scent, its smoke calmly dances across the room caressing the windows glass. Small snowflakes gather, pressing themselves against the other side of the glass, as if daring their fate to meet the warmth of the smoke. But the dainty little snowflakes refuse to melt behind the thin veil of glass and the cherry smoke continues its dance happily. The shadows lengthen, and the room grows dark, my memories and thoughts turn cold. The smoke ceases its dance and the snowflakes stuck upon the glass are left alone, joyless, in mourning. Silently, the dark sky breaks, blushing deep red under a blanket of clouds. Gently, the sky begins to sing her song. A low rumbling lullaby to comfort the blanketed ground below. |
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