Under My Sofa

Legacy

Machines defy gravity as they streak in savagely straight lines across a sour-tasting sky, capturing clouds and stringing them up again in unreachable route to redemption.

If I could follow I would, I'd fly in or outside of those machines, leaving my own wake of conforming cloud and refusing to define myself with the same adjective.

The flying machines, they're not rebellious, just ignorant. They don't know that gravity rules them, so it doesn't affect on their ability to achieve an archaic arc through the air.

I capture clouds because I'm promised each one is lined with silver, but between the bleak droplets of water is nothing but empty air.

Air. Necessary to survive, but not much else. It is, after all, oxygen that ages us at the same time as fuelling flames of life.

Words are the same, a need, a poison. The sweet sustenance of an apple, shielding the sour stipulations of seedy cyanide.

They say the evil Queen killed Snow White, but it was the crushed seeds of love and faith releasing a bitter poison that did the job.

It was the iciness of her own skin, and the blood of her own lips, and the void of her black, black hair. It was a knife of her frozen beauty that forced itself down her throat.

Well, they do say that history repeats itself. While Snow White's sword was beauty, mine is words. Beauty was her strength, and it killed her.

I could shatter syllables into fragile fragments like a looking-glass, and then piece them together to mirror meaning and reflect purpose.

I could smash a sentence against the inside of my skull and force it back together hard enough to change its meaning. I could write myself onto that mythical flying machine.

But it feels like cheating.

So I'll write myself my own heaven, I'll write the scratchy space under the soft sofa, and the bitter ink blackening my tongue, and the sink water swirling down the drain.

And I'll wait until I run out of words to write beauty, and then I'll write myself, and the shattered syllables will stab me in the back, and I'll use too many connectives because I won't be able to breathe,

And my writing will be ripped to pieces, and it'll ricochet down the rabbit hole to a land where maybe the snowflake shreds of paper will hold some meaning.

And maybe then I'll find myself on that aeroplane.

Or maybe I'll be late.

***

Is it poetry? Who knows. I write a story and people tell me it's poetry, and I write a poem and if it doesn't rhyme it's suddenly just writing.

Somebody lay out clearer guidelines.

Anyway, this POEM is kind of metaphorical I think, but I'm not going to explain it. This is one of the ones where you get to pick the meaning.

Alex xxx