WORDS IN A LINE

Her lucidity was no protection against the inevitable tragedy of her existence.

Enough - Heart,

Calm down now. Stop your incessant acrobatics.

There is no room

in this diaphragm. (my breaths, too, take space)

-

Stop your fluttering, and doubting, your half-selved vacillating,

your chatter, like indistinct blaring from a two-stand radio.

Stop, now, for there is no blood left in this beat.

-

Heart, now, be still, be quiet. 

Settle in and hide within the confines of my ribs - I

will protect you. Do not leave this alcove (you have always belonged).

Skin will bleed you, and Flesh will drain

your blood. But pay heed

not to them but to me. For there is nothing left to bleed now, I am spent -

and they - they can take no more from you.

-

Look neither into Mind’s mirror. He

deceives that you are black, and shrivelled -

expired. You should have known

better but

you had too much to give, and in your rage you’d been

drained -

pumping nowhere. 

-

Enough, Heart.

Calm down now, stop your incessant acrobatics.

It has ceased to matter, so stop. Lay down in me, dried, shrivelled and spent,

be still, be quiet. I will protect you.

-

Heart, enough.

Your words slide; cold and casual;

Down the surfaces of my overheated skin; eventual

Confirmations of my guilt-ridden, self-trodden suspicions.

They weren’t unfamiliar altogether, foreign perhaps

From the lips that once traced with heat on heat; a relapse

of -cold, cold, cold desolation; eleven empty consolations.

I try to catch with helpless, futile naivety

The fallen letters in my memory

But in them you bore intricate lacerations

on the tattered and worn seams of my heart; bleed

Out, out, out

Your words tumble; cold and casual.

Where is all that now? - the

foolish grins of recollections; losses, those which

we partook in defiant stout-firm stand against the glaciers 

of cold scrutiny; Where is, now, the icy pool we so eagerly plunged;

in one magnificient arc- the acrobatics of fluid currency? With the taste

of primal fury we conjured whirlpools of

immovable droplets; battled,

cold with warmth and stillness with life.

-

Where are you now? Have the winds carried you too far?

Or have they allowed our years of knotting around your raspberry-scented hair

come undone? Have the curls fallen over your eyes?

They are obscured now, I no longer gaze into the gaze of inifinite depths, nor feel

the soft stillness in touch of your fiery soul.

-

Where are these moments?

Pale, coloured silhouettes distorted,

Framed now, still and lifeless, by wooden inches 4x4,

On the immobile hinges of this clock’s irreproachable door.

I don’t know anything at all.

I guess, I’m happy for you too.

There is a place I sight and see, not with my eyes but with

my feet.

I feel the wet 

of a hollow tree; one loose-trunked tango in

a fiery beat

-

of the gale, one gale, one fearsome storm

of colours, and hues, and foreign forms.

-

Dances, light, plays upon star-sunk sands,

you timid creature of mischievous bands!

Like the inner still of raving hands,

she graces with caution these blackened lands?

-

So caress, caress, oh wind you do smother

with your undiluted, unpolluted, capricious brother - 

the soak-me-down of your erratic tears,

and bind-me-up of your eccentric fears.

-

But hear, be still now, hush and shh-

the breaths and wheezes of a deafening mute.

Still as ever within I lie, the silence of ash in smoldering guilt.