Our weathered amethyst glints dull
to the eye so we drown out the verse
while it tries to shatter an acrylic moon —
Is this the decadent promise of poetry?
Is this how the heart wanders up my throat
and sweeps the dust off a placid tomb?
My fingers siphon the ink from the page
but there is still a soft disturbance
lingering in the air as it trembles with
the memory of your words —
You talk of ‘the light of hidden flowers’
and I can taste my marrow breathing
in the ridges of your skeletal barge.
You preach with an eerie precision of
loving ‘between the shadow and the soul’
and I float in the murky waters of a poem that
quivers with a gentle breeze much like my own.
Your footfalls murmur at the door
with the tempting rustle of crimped silk
and while my typewriter punches out
the same story in different guises,
I feel your palms on my shoulder-blades,
guiding the keys under an amber light.
You touch the paper with a quiet breath
of recognition and your skin sinks into
its shallows — the depths that pretend
to be you and somewhere along the process,
find their own essence reflected in your thoughts.
Is this what it feels like to belong?
Is this the precipice where I flit along the edge
and fall to meet the warm bends of your arms?
You talk of our lives merging to the point
where you cannot tell one end from the other,
and while sometimes I almost consider it a lie,
I have often watched the ‘arrow of carnations’
dying off and shuffled back to our old window-sill
where only the faint ghost of rain reaches
as I am cradled in your seams.
Our weathered amethyst glints dull
to the eye so we scrunch up the dried petals
that grow from the willow of your neck;
we pluck that acrylic moon, still intact,
and crush it to a sugary iridescence —
We meld your arms into mine to sprinkle
your verse into the fragile hour of night.
And there it shines.
