"You can find it someday, honey," they say.
10th August 2002. 8:31 p.m.
A hurriedly peaceful struggle, or rather a scrutinized sleep of eighty hours.
Then calls the Monday mo(u)rning on a rare blue-grey hour.
Heaven feels like a desolate December morning;
Paradise feels like a candied fruit of summer youth;
Hell feels like a tedious bluegrass ringtone of a dead lily plant.
(Everything felt inevitably wrong except you.)
They feel sorry to hear
that you've lost your Grandad today.
Lessons of loss and pain,
Greetings laced with tender (and hasty) sorrow;
A few condolences, white lilies, and deep sighs.
Black waves of flowing dresses and tuxedos.
You don't give a damn about these, nor do they.
Only tired steps on beaten asphalt and deep grieving
fading in the papery air.
You're hanging on a beaded thread of lingering secrets.
The translucence of coffee-burnt smudges glowed
like the salt air memories of paper cuts and margarita on your lips.
A moment, stolen from space to return to you as
a token of crushing oblivion.
You wait and wait and wait—
under the blissfully cruel orange horizon
amid familiar whispers and star-clad calls.
It's pretty much like surviving those memories
over their sympathetic masks,
and moving out of the room as if you're in a rush
to go dress up for school.
But you don't. You instead crumple
in the bed and stare at the blank ceiling
'til the white sheets turn grey in your teardrops.
The thread's now a sheer fiber; winds blow high and low.
Blue sweaters turn azure; lusting lovers beggars in bruises (don't go home).
The stars hang there, burning in crushing pangs of silence.
The ceiling where you had once learned how to
pluck all those stars and stick them on it.
They're tainted in his colors, spilled from your midsummer dreams
of summer blues and midnight greens.
Lone passengers hurry down the abandoned streets
of whitewashed stories and stained flowers.
He doesn't deserve to be above everyone.
The sapling you planted with him last year
has grown a meter by now;
it can laugh with you
and sing in the snow.
Instead, it looks over like million unsaid words,
"Remember me, dear."
And suddenly, this mirage of occasions
gets built over on the sand.
Foam waves sweep through your ankles;
the scent of incense feels good today (for the first time).
Memories burn blue in hushed air calls;
Frost-ridden touches boil your blood—
Strands of jealousy, grief, and late afternoons sway.
It's a cardiac arrest on Thursday.
It's your last telephone call to your only man on Sunday.
It's a pale purple evening of loaded laughter and fallen wishes.
It's all done as the dead rose on Monday.
Even before the storm has come,
Before you can dress up for school.
The world feels like dying in the beaten bronzes and tainted blues.
A pale green, dreamy lover's sleep.
A wave of regrets and "I'm sorry to hear"s;
you're surviving the storms and your fears.
The spaces between the lines of his words
have made it harder to hold on—
Blued bones, decayed words, poisoned minds.
The depth of your scars defile his parted mouth;
how time carries parts of you and him like a neon-marked tattoo.
Memories and cheap poetry taste of salt on your lips;
The muffled hymns vanish in the violet rain.
It never mattered to them, not to you, not to him (and still does not).
Even if he came and went away with the midnight tempest;
it didn't count, did it?
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A/N: Well, your lovely comment and kind vote count very much ;)
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the slow art of breathing bitter
Poetryslow dancing love and pain in the midnight chorus of liquor-washed autumn green ... || a constellation of destructive poetry ||
