i'll never be a poet

medusa

standing in the shower i let the lines of water pierce my mottled cement skin. what's more pockmarks worth of pain than my melted heart. it melted because you reached into my chest cavity that i sliced open for you and you took my heart into your flaming hands in a gentle warm cupping. you forged my heart into iron crystal. blue lines pricked my vision and fell from my eyes as red lines dripped from my blade that i gripped in trembling grasp. my eyes were closed then but i knew that soft weave of black cloud fanned out and shimmered in slow descent as your neck yawned wide and green lines spilled from your new mouth i helped open. my crystalline bejeweled heart moulded in compressed ventricles where your fingers squeezed is a little less than a shred of a beating black tendon. my eyes were closed but my shrivelled heart you had shrunken into a compass needle and i can still feel it tick and spin and prick my ribcage with sharp hisses of "go" and "get" and "take" and "mine". i open my eyes in the shower and see noodles of limp wet hair strung in circles in the drain. water pools around and over them in a webbed skin that does not break. the hair is in thin laces and only moves when water pushes them in false currents. i think about your surging mass of tresses soft-lifted by your quiet confidence in the air. not by the wind nor by ocean. i think about how hair is dead but yours was alive and now they lay on the ground beaten by the shower-rain in straight pelting lines and i wish i opened my eyes one last time around you just to see the look on your face when i kissed you with a dash of sharpened metal.