intermission

I said tonight I wanted to be air again,
the red has etched me to racking sections.
by dusk the assailants will be marching home
and long tired breaths will absorb the charcoaled radius,
where I will walk open through the wreckage,
backwards like a chimera in a deaden movie scene
contemplating its petrified avatars
strewn in dissevered quotas all across the compass,
interspersed,
plagued,
lacerated,
like blacked out chess pieces on a bloodstained board.
my eyes, vermilion and stripped of lids,
my mouth, corpselike and desert,
my throat, numb and wedged with embers.
a blood ingrained nail,
a severed arm,
an ear,
two,
three,
four,
my awareness, hardened to endemic edges,
my memory, punctured by arrays of scalpels,
my logic, consumed by its own weight,
my aims, naked and aguing.
I close the door and they dispel like luster.

in my dream I'll step into a vacant room,
denuded shadow with half-closed eyes.
the neon lights will have been long time shut,
all faces swallowed in muted penumbra,
and words will float around me somehow mangled
that they'll no longer impair my feet like glass.
 
there, next to an opaque window,
my monster and I will sit side by side,
like silhouettes in contre-jour,
disarmed to each other through distant gazes
and conjured in a mutual sealing silence.

my goodness, I haven't slept in months...