Upon dread and dried soil,
It rained ashes
Every particle swirling in misty
Fogs of hellfire
Sun a burning orb enshrouded
Blazing salmon and sunrise
Stripped and blackened umber
I stood in the falling fractals
As my membranes scorched of smoke
Veiled, ****** light reflecting through the ash
Situated, if only briefly
A particular kind of
Doomed beauty.

There was a clearing in the darkening wood
Where my beauty would come to meet me
Blades and grasses of sentience in which I stood
Hummed therein a lyric of unequivocal destiny.

Tonight my beauty would find me
Even when crossing over the yellowing musk
Tripping through ivy's tangled eaves.
Reverberating seed and floating husk.

Even if it was terrified of the darkness,
Pinholes in the ceiling extending out of reach
Purging the tiger lily, weeping catharsis
Veins swelling within birch and beech

It would come, following trail and print
Drifting with cicada, down feathers of phlox
Treading across fragrant stems of peppermint
Into Fear's waters, Truth's rising equinox.

The sky was a wounded rabbit punctured through,
Crippled and limping across thinning treetops
Tracing spattered blood of evening dew
Breached forest's sharp edge and came to a stop.

Dense, wet footfalls swiftly soaked my spine
Impaling me with a realization consumingly remote
I only so much became the fireflies within the pine
That swayed my limbs and took my throat.

My childhood bedroom was my womb
An artist's mind trapped within the warm blue paint
That encased me.
A twin bed of wrought iron
I drew names on in sharpie,
Lines of fragmented musings
Littering the space between breath and being.
I gestated myself there,
Beyond the touch of others
I was everything and nothing
A ball of hope and pain
A rudimentary cross-stitch of dreams dying early
Stuffed animal nostalgia
And my first trips into womanhood.
My carpet a sea of tears,
Broken discs and sighs that never even reached
The windowpane.
In the youth of my room,
I waded through my own fantasies
Thick enough for rain boots.
I intricately spun webs of delusion,
Of love.
I conjured up my own demons
In the absence of fear--
In the safety of my enshroudment.
It became a lesser known evil
Staying within the basement of my body,
That still floods me
With fantastical depression.
I left it when I was seventeen
Young enough to still feel the overwhelming weight
Of life,
And never walked back through the door frame
That held so much
For so long.
Eventually,
Posters were ripped down
Drawings painted over,
The last scraps of who I was
Given to charity.
I'd like to think that room remains somewhere
Composed and preserved
The day it was left,
The day my innocence was
Abandoned.