Photo Prompt #28 “Climbing the Walls”

ghost-of-a-gone-bird@Deviant Art

 

Whenever I scream

It’s always behind a fist

Of carefully perforated neglect

A little window of light

As inconsistent as a pupil

Hardly worthy of mention

But if not for that oversight

I would have darkened entirely.

 

Being is more than enough

Too much when it assumes

The future tense.

I wear my nails to a pulp

Later I’ll fashion the shavings

Into a fine ivory parchment

Too rigid to absorb ink

I’ll write barren poems

And we’ll both weep

Under the white ceiling.

 

When I ascend this outer wall,

The first of many shells,

Will you extract the bones

From my larynx

That I might draw a breath

Every now and again?

The gravity of success

Plays me like a dervish

And I cannot but waver.

 

I do not want to speak

Of therapy or torture

Of the moon-harvested vacancies

That gnaw at my heart

As if it were comprised

Of rubber bands.

I will never be beautiful

In terms that other’s envy.

I am strange, stranger

Even than the imaginings

You’ve used to persecute me

Though perhaps less evil

 

My hair comes out like cotton

As if my head were a field

Infested with veils

That have not yet been sewn.

I am naked as a watermark

Clutching the wallpaper

As a virgin does modesty

But I am not a virgin anymore

Never was thanks to the apples

Shat by my liberal ancestors.

 

They’ve taken my blood

And I theirs so there’s no knowing

In whom the contagion began

Perhaps it was born of this union?

A kind of karmic revulsion

That we pass between us

Like bouts of hysteria.

 

They suggest that love is art

And yet so few are willing

To divulge their content

And who can claim beauty

Or profundity in such fallacies?

I do not wish to assimilate with you

The invertebrate variable

The necrotizing fascist

This life will kill me soon enough