The stories line her freckles like pixie lights,
Like a cluster of dim stars in an unpainted sky
on another cold night.
The caress of summer snow huddles close
to the aged men on the glistening pavements;
They grumble, but they're secretly happy —
the cherishing of collected touches from unhappier times.
How unholy of their hymns
To burn holes in her chest and like that,
never getting healed and pale blue.
Their words, how sinful upon the feet of flowers.
Their songs, how tragic to chap her lips rheumatic.
Yet, they smile.
Their thin smiles sculpted on their white faces.
She takes a long drag on a cigar:
A ghost of grey lingers
in the thick air — the songs buzz through.
They sing of rotten time and stormy skies;
They laugh at unholy love and burning hearts;
They talk about the dying sun.
To them, life's blasphemous enough to die upon flowers.
But she knows better.
Life's another whisper like a ghost of a cigar
That comes each champagne night, lingers
long, and then vanishes early into the swooshing air.
A red stream of everything finds its way through her void heart.
The land's growing, but the bodies wasted.
And like a mistake thin as her silk robe —
everything slips away like another nightmare.
She watches, and they wait.
The seasons go off the key,
The lovers huddle close in the rain.
Cold sweaters warm in grief;
Torn sleeves brimming with inked tattoos —
and like a fire of rain kisses, the smoke fades
into the cold summer breeze.
The old men are fast asleep.
Her cigar dies at half past twelve.
Ice-white walls whisper death.
The cathedrals quiet the birds with a hush of never looking back again.
Her museum of aching art loses its way
into the curling screams of her razor cuts.
Her heart races colder; their blood stills in the dark.
A lone sketch in charcoal dust fades upon the wasted.
The songs end a hopeless orchestra of storms.
But she knows better.
When the time comes,
all will rise in the colors
of the falling sun, and
there will be broad daylight
upon the bloodless wasted.
——————————————
A/N: What happens next? Voting??
YOU ARE READING
the slow art of breathing bitter
Poetryslow dancing love and pain in the midnight chorus of liquor-washed autumn green ... || a constellation of destructive poetry ||
