Imagine:
To have moulded you from clay
Carved your irises with a dry rose's stem
To have held your hand, brushed against your ears.
I held your neck and it awoke in me
A fear that stayed until my end
Until it wove itself into the threads of our lips;
And now no one can truly hear our tale
Without the devilish tickle of fear of love.
You used to stare until a black hole had harpooned my studio.
God, I'd say, has anyone alive looked at me like that?
It felt the way it does to hold a sparrow in your palms
Tenderness and trust and whatever else it takes to not crush the weakling
Lo and behold and step back and pull the curtains apart:
You were alive.
You, who never failed to stand there against my wooden studio walls,
Whom I poured my thoughts and soul into —
Well. You had drunk them all, you poor dear, thirsty for a mortal love.
[Wasn't that our undoing?]
You'd move your nimble fingers,
And press your forehead against my collarbone,
And eat the dry roses that'd begun to rot,
And I couldn't have seen a sight more divine.
The gods were wrong, soul.
Divinity is not a curse.
I watched you,
on the hard stone floor, blood in your hands as you tore the nobleman apart,
Blood on the money he'd brought,
You had become a god.
And now I can only watch from afar:
My body long gone, my bones aching and rattling
For your hard gaze.
You, with Monet and his peers as your background
Who outshines the poets of the hundred years past.
They cover you now with a white silk and lace cloth.
At night when they know you're alive, they feel
A fatal fascination to watch you as I did.
I can only long from afar.
The cloth was meant to be cotton, I think,
Like the ones that drape all the other sculptures,
But they as I couldn't deny
What you deserve, like
A beauty in the wake of horror.
A horror they see every time someone braves a visit after dark.
You were never the same after they sapped my life and tore us apart.
(a/n - i tried to spice up the formatting. how'd you find it? also, i hate the ending but eh.)
