Poetry Attempt: I don't know anymore
There's really not much left to say. Or maybe nothing to say at this moment. If I could decide on the exact day when the sky would open up and the earth would be devoured into an apocalypse sparing no living souls, I would choose August 21st. I don't want to be reminded of anything anymore. Here's a new poem.
“Starcrossed lovers
On a treacherous night
Sharpening the blades
Of murderous delight.”
- Steve Severin
Trapped
Discarded black lace dances
Across the rain-soaked windowsill
Once used to shield your escape attempts
Numbered steps to ease existence
Gasping for swift release
His hands are clenching them closed
He’s tasting your blood filtered through twisting necks
And ink-stained bed sheets
Your tongue slipping through flecks of skin
Trapped in his blackened gums.
Pills scattered across your cut-up desk
Xanax lodged in your drying throat
Poisoned spit is your only resource
Overburdened by the new familiarity
Memories stand on the precipice
Fireflies made of lead
Assailing them from all sides
Your breath gives out.
Stuck with desperation for dreamless sleep
But a life without her
Beckons you
To the place where nightmares wait
So each night brings on a colorless room
Suspended by rocks and cloud-piercing ship masts
Where you watch as barbed apparatuses mechanically snap forward
Covering the melting whites of her eyes
Interlocked in drooping skull craters
With a deafening click
It’s all doomed to cascade in endless repetition
Try to reach out to her
But your words slip into warbled, industrial-crunched nonsense
Shouting in fried radio wires
Antennas soaked in ether
Transmit the last echoes of your annihilated heart.
-
The fleshy, pulsating antechamber sings
We’re trapped in the machine of fate
I never know when to follow
And when to quit
Refusing reality, I twist up into you
Dislodge your roots
Our sweat pouring into each other, devouring the pounding sky
A stifled and shared voice escaping our entwinement
Porcelain and candlelight burning the image
Of our mangled shadows
Into the black-mold-encrusted walls.
I stop and finally dream
Kissing the new lacerations down your arm
That open up and breathe like blood-engorged gills
Tufts of perfumed silence and anesthesia
Blossoms out
Encroaching gloom at the cruel embrace of wakefulness
Hypnagogic shrouds you’re left in forever
Desire unrequited
Every dream thrown on moon-bleached alters
Smashed to infinite pieces in the sharpened edge of night
I’m pulled through the ruins
Your image painfully coiled around my head
Before the fall, I force my hand inside
Unfurl your tongue and watch
Dead moths, exoskeletons, and wine
Pooling at my feet.
Our previous entrapment
Was only an endless march
Of broken ventilators
Heaving forth an atmosphere of broken glass
And rusted metal shining
In the captured deadness of your smile
Our Eden barely kept alive
I’d throw my life past the threshold
Of decaying oblivion
Just to see it all again.
But you don’t see what I see,
The dancing carnival creatures
With hooks distending their painted faces
Wires operating their jointless bones
Waves of inflamed insects as scarification
In their loosening flesh
Blackened wormwood growing from
Their needle-marked scalps
Their voices dazzling in my head
Telling me of all the ways it will end
And how I’ll be worth all your hate.
I gifted them the heads of kings
And let them take control
They foretold the curtain call and the grand decapitation
Of me and my love
Long before the inevitable took hold of my throat
And shoved me into six feet of dirt.
I gesture wrongly to my towering pallbearers
With their crumbling masks of uncanny expressions
And cloaks undulating in the mud
Skeletal hands succumbing to dust beneath,
Begging them with a medicine cabinet stuck in my throat
To bring you here
Force you to be face-to-face with my becoming
My cosmic undoing spiraling towards
And within
The screeching unnamable vortex of your absence.
But you were never really there, were you?
-
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