THE WHITE ROSE PAINTED WITH BLOOD

xxxvii - poem 2; imagine me

to _marrnight and astropoets

her lungs were once
a palace garden that grew
white rose painted with blood and
divine daffodils dancing on the doorstep and
ivy that curled and twisted over
the walls of her bronchial tubes and
peach pits in her alveoli that sprung up
into skyscrapers and
crimson poppies
with petals like butterfly wings and
supernovas of petals in her bronchioles

(the garden was the first they took away;
lungs aren't meant to grow flowers)

I AM INSANE

she lay on the floor in the middle
of the prison enclosed in
what they called a sanctuary
(gunmetal gray on all 6 sides)
and with her chipped nails she
scratched poetry
into the indifferent ground
and wondered how long it would take
to dig through the lethal walls
with her plastic fingertips
and of the fatal world on the other side
that would squeeze all the dawn-colored blood
from her asphyxiated veins
and paint with them on the walls
for all humanity to see
that she was a monster

(these walls gave no sunlight;
the darkness smothered her)

I AM CONFINED

breathe
b-r-e-a-t-h-e

breath, alice.

oxygen tasted strange in her shuddering lungs
now barren without the garden
that had made her feel alive

she exhaled stars, suns, and moons
breathing dreams like air
painting nebulas and supernovas
flashing forestgreen neonblue
pastelpink indigold and black
against the gray gray gray gray gray
she breathed her dreams to paint her cage
painting dreamlike civilizations on titan
and saturn's rings flashing iridescent colors
and jupiter dancing with callisto and europa
and starcrossed lovers ripped apart by a star in between
and uranus leaning against it's belt of ice
while mirranda and titania did pirouettes around him

she imagined shattered stars
and the milky way
like a pearly scar in the universe
she imagined exploding suns
and the lachrymose tunes
between constellations
imagined disoriented pinpricks of light
in the broken sky
and she stargazed into the universe she'd created

(her breaths still held magic in its strands)

I AM NOT ASHAMED

she imagined blackholes in which
she was about to drown in
and now she was at the event horizon
about to be sucked into another universe
one better than this one

THAT I STILL 
LOVE MY MIND

she imagined wonderland
on the other side

imagine me
master of my own universe
i am everything i ever dreamed of
-tahereh mafi