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I'm on a train.

One of those red ones with black trimmed windows you can imagine rolling through the suburbs on the way to NYC. Not a subway car but a classier vintage with proper rows of cushioned seats and a lever to pull if there is an emergency. There are sparse shrubberies on one side of the tracks and the ocean on the other. Young trees and bushes stroll by.  A little wind is pushing off the ocean, massaging the car ever so gently back and forth as we move along. A gentle click-clack is on the tips of our ears.

We got on together. I hadn't known you for very long but the connection was stronger than anything I had ever felt or have since. You practically sat on top of me for the first few miles. Couldn't keep your hands off me,  staring in my eyes like you were searching for something lost but you couldn't remember what. The edges of your lips turned upwards permanently as if you were always at the verge of a laugh. You interlaced my fingers with yours and held on like you would be ripped away if your grip loosened for even a second. Slender fingers holding so tightly that they were becoming red.

You were excited to to be riding with me, about where we were going and all the things we would do when we got there. I would see you peer out of the corner of your eye, then lean over to brush your soft cheek against my budding stubble. Kissing and gently biting my lips insatiably. The suns rays coming in at an angle and lighting up your perfect smile and dimple.

I had to remind you we were in public.

I was lost in your blonde curls and the incense of your neck. I had fallen incredibly hard and so fast that my face hurt from smiling and my heart beat with vibrations I had never known. Not even a whiff of anxiety or neurosis. Some of the best memories of my life, as fleeting as they turned out to be.

I yawned and you put your finger in my mouth. I bent over to tie my shoe and you would poke my **** and laugh with your own reflection in the window, like this was the first and best joke of all time. Maybe it was and maybe it is.

The waiter came and informed us that a thing called "the bar car" existed. We both jumped at the idea. I didn't exactly notice at the time, during our excitement, but that's when the train started going faster and everything out the windows began to blur.

The bar car was a wild ride and we took advantage of our lo'cal. All kinds of fine wine, liquors and illicit substances were available. We tried them all. You were beautiful, your laugh infecting everyone around you, I was charming and held a captive audience.   It was a dark, loud and glorious blur. We were the life of the party and it chugged on till dawn.

We woke up in our seats, disheveled and discombobulated. It was dark out already. Did we sleep through the entire day? The train was slowing down, maybe approaching a station. The party was amazing but we were certainly paying the price for the black out. You moved over to the seat across from me to have some more space and lay down. I saw myself in the reflection. My hat, charm and smile from the night before had vanished. I must have left them in the bar car the night before.
      You had changed, beauty uninterrupted but different somehow. I couldn't put my finger on it. Irritated maybe? I invited you to cuddle and battle the hangover together but you ignored me. Like you couldn't hear me or didn't want to. I decided to let you be.

I got up to use the bathroom and thought I would go look for my scattered belongings. Maybe I could find a scrap of leftover dignity while you rested. I inquired to the conductor who directed me to the bartender in the bar car. He hadn't changed a bit, somehow untouched and unaffected by last nights antics that had effected me so dramatically.  Same black suspenders and white pressed shirt with impeccably slicked hair. I asked him what happened and if I had an open tab. While slowly polishing a rocks glass he looked up and made eye contact for a split second before looking away.
He said:  "Oh the bar car takes its toll. In the end we all end up paying one way or another". I still don't know what he meant by that or if he knew.
      I asked him if he found my hat and he said he would check the camera. We walked in to a small back room, while he was reviewing the tape, over his shoulder I noticed a tragedy.

We were drunk. I was going on to a group of new friends on one side of the bar, they were hanging on my words and I was eagerly explaining whatever nonsense they were drooling over. You were in the corner wearing that red dress I love, with your hair up in a tight bun. A few curls had escaped and brushed your high cheekbones, a thin line of pearls dancing delicately across your perfectly symmetrical collar. You were stunning and inebriated, swaying with each bump and motion of the train. A man wearing my hat put his hand on your side to keep you from swaying over and then he left it there.
I took a sharp breath.

It looked like you put your hand on his hand to move it but then it stayed and you both swayed together. As the air left my lungs and the blood drained out of my face I watched your lips touch the strangers. A small piece of my soul slipped away forever. I couldn't watch any further. When I asked the bartender how long it went on he fidgeted for a moment and uncomfortably muttered "quite some time". I never found my hat or the other part of me that left that day.  

The train slowed. I walked to the back, as far away from you as I could get, in utter disbelief. How could you? I thought to myself.
I mourned the loss of the you as I knew you yesterday, quietly and to myself. A tear  escaped my eye and rolled down my now fully formed stubble as I fell in to a random seat in mild shock. There were a few passengers back there so I had to pull together relatively quickly. After gaining some composure I knew it was time to get off. I knew we could never get back to yesterday morning though I would have said or done anything to do so.

The train had stopped. I went back to my seat and you were sleeping. I took my coat and gathered my things. The conductor looked at me confused as to why I would leave something so magnificent, I assume he had no idea what had transpired.   

I walked to the rear of the car and slid the door open slower than required. I stepped to the stairs and put one foot down on the step and the other on the ground. I stopped, rooted with my hand on the railing, lingering between two very different paths.
     I knew that it was time to get off, I knew this was the sensible thing to do, that I couldn't get past this offense regardless of how I had felt earlier the day before. The whistle screamed from the locomotive. The conductor looked at me and shook his head, I'm not sure if he was trying to tell me to stay or go but a decision had to be made.

The train lurched forward and I watched as the station slip away slowly. I sat in between the cars for a while and watched the ocean and birds. With a heavy heart and shoes I walked back to my seat. You were waiting. Crying. You knew. The bartender had told you. You didn't mean do do it, didn't realize what you were doing and thought it was me. He was wearing my hat and the whole world was blurry and dark.

I believed you. Self anguish mixed with alcohol was dripping from your pores. I knew you didn't mean it and were drunk, but could I ever forgive you or trust you again?

I loved you still.

I caught a glimpse of my reflection, a weaker version of myself looked back. As if an invisible chip in my teeth had developed and my shoulders lowered. The charming, confident man from the bar car the day before had been replaced. Something was off but not enough for anyone else to notice, just enough to know a change has happened.
       The train started to pick up speed again as we distanced ourselves from the station.  I second guessed my decision to stay but I didn't look back.

I found the man with my hat and punished him with a few blows in the dark. He knew he ****** up, apologized and took the beating like a man. I never got the hat back.

The engineer announced that we would be going through a tunnel soon and to turn on our lights and keep our hands in the windows.

It would be dark.  

We stayed away from the bar car for a while but the draw was irresistible. After a few hours we were there again but you never left my side.  Then you did. I was looking for you but you would disappear and not answer me when I called you name. The tunnel went deeper and darker and I didn't know where you were and I suspected you liked it that way. The train began to slow down again as we exited the tunnel.

I finally found you back at our seat, you had moved one row away from me. I asked you to come back, tried to hold your hands but you pulled away with vehemence. When I came back from the bathroom you had moved another row farther.
I knew I was losing you.
I begged you to return but you told me calmly that it was time for you to get off. At some point in the tunnel you had decided that you didn't want to go anymore . Your mind was made. You were going to catch another train at the next station.

When the train stopped I thought for sure you would reconsider but you didn't. Didn't even give it a thought. You just grabbed your coat and hat with one big bag under your arm. You kissed me on the cheek like a french stranger and were off. Going somewhere else on a different train. Just like that.

I rode the rails for quite some time by myself , many people getting on and getting off, passing me by. Every once in a while I would think I saw you at a station or in a **** though the window of another train. I often thought I could smell you but when I breathed deeper it was always gone. A ghost dancing on the edge of my senses.

A young girl in a headband got on the train. She was listening to headphones and dancing to herself as she bobbed along. She sat down in the seat next to me flashing a smile. She had a wedding ring on and I dismissed her immediately.  She didn't move from the seat or stop glancing my way. Eventually she confessed that she wanted to talk. I told her I wasn't interested but she persisted.  I hadn't talked to anyone on the train for quite some time and after some more mild persistence, I gave in.

We had a lot in common. We were both riding alone, desperately wanted attention and were thrilled to receive some.  After a few laughs she slid her hand in to mine and interlaced her fingers. I left it there. It was warm, comforting and wrong. She was married but I had been riding alone so long it felt good to have some company. She stayed and we talked. She was broken and I had a knack for fixing things. After a few hours of dramatic conversation I fell asleep with her head on my shoulder.

When I woke up  the train was flying up the track on the side of a mountain. Trees and rocks were a blur of green and grey. The engineer must be trying to make up for lost time I thought to myself.

The girl was asleep with her head on my lap. I looked down at her hand and the rings were gone. I woke her briefly to ask where they went. She said she didn't need them anymore and had thrown  them out the window.  She could of sold them, I said, but she said she just wanted them gone so she could be mine and fell back to sleep.  All of a sudden I couldn't breath. This train was roaring down the tracks, the once gentle click clack had become a loud hum. Suddenly too loud. This girl in my lap who had just gotten on the train wanted to stay. I considered her for a while as she looked up at me with big blue eyes, shining and wet, like a puppy in the shelter, terrified of rejection and desperate to be adopted.

At the peak of the mountain, just when the train began to even out, you waltzed back in to the car with a champagne flute in one hand and your bag in the other.

I don't know when or where you got back on, must have been a few stations ago when I stopped looking for you. Maybe you were wearing a disguise, who knows what you had been up to while you were gone. I'm not sure how long you were away but it was quite some time. That you had been through something was obvious, a new wrinkle had formed on your brow and you're once confident stride had changed to a cautious stroll. What actually happened out there I don't know.  I never asked and I don't want answers.

You looked at me and smiled. It was good to see that smile, like sun on my face on a brisk day.  You took a step toward me and then I looked down in my lap at the girl at the same time you did. I looked up. You and your smile were gone.

Everything I had begun to feel for this broken, head banded girl in my lap dried up like a puddle in  the dessert.  I quietly and gently nudged her awake and told her I had to use the bathroom. She put her head down on my coat and fell back into what ever trance she had been in, eyelids gently fluttering, eyes searching beneath them for what I would never give her.

I dashed up the isle and threw open the door, almost shattering the glass. The conductor glared at me and rolled his eyes as I barged past to the space between the cars.

There you were. Standing on the stairs with your head out the opening. The wind was blowing your perfectly formed curls around your head like a blonde explosion of familiarity. I yelled your name and you dove in to me. My senses erupted, my mind went numb as the train was nearing another station and I inhaled your essence greedily.

We moved to another car. I abandoned my coat with the married girl and never looked back. I hope she found what she was looking for. I  never could have been the answer she was so desperately seeking but I know I  helped steer her towards it.

You told me you had encountered some other people out there on the rails and they had reminded you of what we had when we first left the station. I never forgot.  

The train started to rock and get going again. We were back in the bar car and starting to brown out. We had to get off of this train right ******* now. In a desperate moment we looked at each other and put our hands, together, on the emergency brake cord. I looked in your eyes with your hand on top of mine. You kissed me while yanking down on the cord. Time slowed, the breaks squealed and everything exploded throwing luggage, people and the entire contents of the bar car in to a nondiscriminatory chaos . We got up off the ground, ran to the end of the car, dove off the side in to a soft patch of grass and rolled down a small incline. We watched as the conductor sifted through  the mess and interrogated the passengers, trying to ferret out the party responsible for pulling the brake. He spotted us off the side of the tracks and shook his fist while shouting every conceivable obscenity combination.

We laughed, held each other in the grass and kissed deeply.

We watched the train pick up speed and disappear in to the hills as relief spread over me.

You interlaced your fingers in to mine and we both looked out to where the tracks disappeared into the horizon, wondering how far of a walk it was to the next station.
mûre Jan 2012
Verbosity
A patchwork quilt that I roll roll up in
Stitched with syllables
Like a little phonetic sausage
So deep inside you can't hear me go
Dur dur dur.
(insert self-deprecating quip about being a wiener)
laughing track
But it's cozy and neat.
And if you do
I'll rubix cube your dearest mind
Til I'm tucked deep inside once again.  

And I'll softly pontificate about the genetic code
and how it made your irises not quite hazel
But still able to illuminate spontaneously
teal, laurel, cyan, the sea
And if you'll pardon my hyperboles
They draw me strong as an Atlantic tide
This ocean that ***** me the deepest inside
Aesthetically, the contrast is startling to your skin
An artist would capture the portrait therein
But really, all you need to know
Is they're the prettiest
prettiest ******* eyes
I've ever seen.

And I'm sorry
That when I get nervous
My heart is a little effervescent
My words become too efflorescent
(I seek not to strangle you with King's English Shrubberies!)  
As you stand before me, incandescent
My dread is that you're
Evanescent.

...

But that thing about your eyes.
All you need to know.
That thing about your eyes,
Not to mince words

But I think

I'll feel that way always.
Hail! generous youth, whom glory’s sacred flame
Inspires, and animates to deeds of fame;
Who feel the noble wish before you die
To raise the finger of each passer-by:
Hail! may a future age admiring view
A Falkland or a Clarendon in you.
But as your blood with dangerous passion boils,
Beware! and fly from Venus’ silken toils:
Ah! let the head protect the weaker heart,
And Wisdom’s ægis turn on Beauty’s dart.

     *       *       *       *       *

But if ’tis fix’d that every lord must pair,
And you and Newstead must not want an heir,
Lose not your pains, and scour the country round,
To find a treasure that can ne’er be found!
No! take the first the town or court affords,
Trick’d out to stock a market for the lords;
By chance perhaps your luckier choice may fall
On one, though wicked, not the worst of all:

     *       *       *       *       *

One though perhaps as any Maxwell free,
Yet scarce a copy, Claribel, of thee;
Not very ugly, and not very old,
A little pert indeed, but not a scold;
One that, in short, may help to lead a life
Not farther much from comfort than from strife;
And when she dies, and disappoints your fears,
Shall leave some joys for your declining years.

But, as your early youth some time allows,
Nor custom yet demands you for a spouse,
Some hours of freedom may remain as yet,
For one who laughs alike at love and debt:
Then, why in haste? put off the evil day,
And ****** at youthful comforts while you may!
Pause! nor so soon the various bliss forego
That single souls, and such alone, can know:
Ah! why too early careless life resign,
Your morning slumber, and your evening wine;
Your loved companion, and his easy talk;
Your Muse, invoked in every peaceful walk?
What! can no more your scenes paternal please,
Scenes sacred long to wise, unmated ease?
The prospect lengthen’d o’er the distant down,
Lakes, meadows, rising woods, and all your own?
What! shall your Newstead, shall your cloister’d bowers,
The high o’erhanging arch and trembling towers!
Shall these, profaned with folly or with strife,
An ever fond, or ever angry wife!
Shall these no more confess a manly sway,
But changeful woman’s changing whims obey?
Who may, perhaps, as varying humour calls,
Contract your cloisters and o’erthrow your walls;
Let Repton loose o’er all the ancient ground,
Change round to square, and square convert to round;
Root up the elms’ and yews’ too solemn gloom,
And fill with shrubberies gay and green their room;
Roll down the terrace to a gay parterre,
Where gravel’d walks and flowers alternate glare;
And quite transform, in every point complete,
Your Gothic abbey to a country seat.

Forget the fair one, and your fate delay;
If not avert, at least defer the day,
When you beneath the female yoke shall bend,
And lose your wit, your temper, and your friend.
Michael Ryan Sep 2016
I am
the beauty
that which captures
even my own canvas.

An illustrious
painting to things undeserving--
wrapping up ugliness
with the truth of nature--
these shrubberies
will hide
and protect those
from the dangers
within myself.  

Convincing
the world that
We are not dying or struggling,
but merely making art--
is this not the means of artistry.

If I do not suffer
then I will never complete
my Sistine chapel
or find the real Mona Lisa
hidden amongst these frauds.  

These fears are real,
and every day
they are realized--
where my peers, friends, family
say 'I will be fine"
so I act as if I am.

No longer eating
instead I portray the art of eating--
the sun has found out
I am defenseless against it,
but I still paint myself in the light
so my lilies can survive
off the energy draining out of me.
A perspective on perspective and art.  Hiding in plain sight.
Looking heavenward, I see only the earth.
The stars align and the planets turn,
But what of the holy?

Archangels sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
And the collared cherubim bleed into the rainswept gutters
Like cut dogs in cardboard boxes by the highways of New York,
Or the roadsides of back-alley Brooklyn or Paterson,
Where the demonic masses lie naked in the streets,
Their souls bared raw to heaven
And their hair as messy as sidestreet dumpsters.

The misted rain fogs on the busted double glazing,
The bare limbed trees outside fallen victim to a long winter
And a late spring.
The air that blows through the streets of these mundane cul-de-sacs
Has passed through the lungs of cancerous dodgers
In those hell-indulgent cities,
Where children find their kicks by freerunning
Across buildings of bricks made from c-grades,
Or by standing atop high-rises in the grey wind,
And biting their tongues only to feel their own consciousness
Burrowing into them
Like parasites from the condemning schoolhouses or university halls.

You’re alone when your skies turn grey,
And the rain falls with all the purposeful intent of a neon god.
You’re alone when your smashed milk bottles and broken plates
Are like music on those drug-dampened dawns,
You’re alone when your cold, ash-stippled roof gardens
Are your only way to heaven,
You’re alone when your fingers are cut on your own writing
And you are dizzy from spinning yourself sick
Alone in your splintered art lofts.

Your stars are misaligned and your planets need engine grease to turn,
And you sit and smoke and weep on tenement rooftops,
But you still look heavenward.
You see your madness in the same silver moon
That compels the tide and transfixes wolves,
You recognise yourself in newspaper clippings proclaiming ******,
You acknowledge your expression in broken syringes
And powder remnants
On the glass-topped coffee tables of water-dripping apartments,
You feel your heartbeat in the gasolined engines
Of stuttering Cadillacs
And taste your own warm lifeblood in the burgers of roadside diners.

You see cosmological galaxies bursting like Van Goghs,
Horrible, bitter-cold starstorms underneath white skies,
Raindrop-dripping garden leaves in shrubberies and verges
And earthy rockeries,
You dream of enlightened, ***-smoking boys in beat-up trailers
And the cluttered box rooms of sky-high apartments,
Of screeching atop stone-cragged mountains of green in highlands,
Of bell-rung harbours in the white seaside towns of England,
Of the salt-chapped lips of fisherwives
And the bone-skinny children of sailors,
Of visionary angels in stained glass cathedrals,
Of the cobbled thoroughfares of lamplit cafes in a Parisian purgatory.

And yet you lie naked on floors,
You lie high on floors and let visions spill from your hands
Like the whiskey you drink.
You are under us now,
Under the earth like meat sacks.
But your vision lives on
In every piece of self-indulgent fuckery written for you,
In every copy of your collected works
Or your novels.

Seek,
Live,
****,
Die.
For you are immortal, in the end.
**** ending, but endings are hard.
Donall Dempsey Aug 2016
THE FLIGHT OF DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

( for my little brother Brian )

Ahhhh....here you
are again.

You who
are here and yet not

here
a shadow tossed aside

a breeze stalking
the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves
foliage on the move

that then: stops

silence solidified
...or did it?

The flight of darkness
into light

suddenly a paw
tentatively becomes a snout

then the all of you
"Friend fox. . !"

I call to you
mind to mind

you looking
as if you've heard

stare at my silent
voice

both of us amazed
you ever so

red before becoming
a shadow tossed aside

a here not here
the flight of darkness into light

a  breeze
stalking the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves.
One of my last conversations with my brother( conversations could be 3 hours on the phone )and he told me of a fox he had seen. He asked me why I had never written a poem for him and would I write his experience for him. I did so and it lay there in my scribbly hieroglyph until I managed to decipher my own writing( this is easier said than done). I was going to read it to him at the next phone call but there never was another phone call. The fox and my brother now merging into one in the here/not here.
Arjun Tyagi Nov 2013
A falling footstep
lagging behind in slow time
how far shall it reach?

A white halo there
Abysmal luminescence
will the journey end?

Broken bushes here
burnt shrubberies over there
where is the gardener?

He must have tended
these dead flowers once in bloom
is the halo safe?

As it draws on me
a question was realized
am I sent to burn?

To lay in the pyre
a funeral bed is set
will the ashes stay?

The gardener comes
a sweep of eternal hands
another dead flower.
Donall Dempsey Aug 2016
THE FLIGHT OF DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

( for my little brother Brian )

Ahhhh....here you
are again.

You who
are here and yet not

here
a shadow tossed aside

a breeze stalking
the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves
foliage on the move

that then: stops

silence solidified
...or did it?

The flight of darkness
into light

suddenly a paw
tentatively becomes a snout

then the all of you
"Friend fox. . !"

I call to you
mind to mind

you looking
as if you've heard

stare at my silent
voice

both of us amazed
you ever so

red before becoming
a shadow tossed aside

a here not here
the flight of darkness into light

a  breeze
stalking the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves.


One of my last conversations with my brother( conversations could be 3 hours on the phone )and he told me of a fox he had seen. He asked me why I had never written a poem for him and would I write his experience for him. I did so and it lay there in my scribbly hieroglyph until I managed to decipher my own writing( this is easier said than done). I was going to read it to him at the next phone call but there never was another phone call. The fox and my brother now merging into one in the here/not here.
Pallavi Goswami Jun 2016
Bit by bit she begins to splatter
and petrichor emanates silently,
Soon transforms into sharp silver blades
treating earth like a piano
and playing on her rhythmically.

Later
a restless crescendo
marks her arrival
sings her praise
for she has come to rescue
eventually.

Low on expectations,
for what is it she would want,
sisterhood emerges between two Godly ladies.

Rain bequeaths a cold sweet scented earth,
and heals her wounds
with tiny shrubberies
and some with love.

But the departure is what is inevitable.
unannounced , unexpected it pulls her back.
Leaving behind an invisible assurance
She moves back for a refill
so that
it can Rain Again.
Donall Dempsey Aug 2017
THE FLIGHT OF DARKNESS INTO LIGHT
( for my little brother Brian )


Ahhhh....here you
are again.

You who
are here and yet not

here
a shadow tossed aside

a breeze stalking
the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves
foliage on the move

that then: stops

silence solidified
...or did it?

The flight of darkness
into light

suddenly a paw
tentatively becomes a snout

then the all of you
"Friend fox. . !"

I call to you
mind to mind

you looking
as if you've heard

stare at my silent
voice

of us amazed
you ever so

red before becoming
a shadow tossed aside

a here not here
the flight of darkness into light

a  breeze
stalking the shrubberies

the ghost of leaves.
***




One of my last conversations with my brother( conversations could be 3 hours on the phone )and he told me of a fox he had seen. He asked me why I had never written a poem for him and would I write his experience for him. I did so and it lay there in my scribbly hieroglyph until I managed to decipher my own writing( this is easier said than done). I was going to read it to him at the next phone call but there never was another phone call. The fox and my brother now merging into one in the here/not here.
Debopriyaa Dutta Apr 2020
it seems that the only antidote to the poison of existence is to write. to write, like our forefathers did - purposeful seclusion, months of trance-like writing, like a murderer maddened by the idea of salvation - writing, with ink-stained fingers, aching joints on the same old, trusty typewriter; writing, while wallowing in the deepest pits of despair, stuck inside a shabby room, dishevelled with books unread and re-read countless times…

to witness the act of writing - be it a staged enaction, wherein  an artist just slips his malleable soul into the garb of the prophet - to witness the act itself is a travesty, an ache on the roof of one’s mouth: out of reach, foreign, uneasiness swirling. nothing soothes, or quite imparts the strength to digest reality like the simulated sound of a virtual typewriter - the old, familiar clang that sustained generations of kindred souls, the tolling of the bell that eclipsed the knell of death, of betrayal, of a life cut short by cruelty, of unrequited love, of angst, of abuse - that of others and the self.

our modern machines that make life so easy, appear as a hindrance, an obstacle to the realization of my true self. or is it just incompetence, meandering as un-bloomed fantasies, that have been thwarted by none but my own futile sense of pride, which, in the very end, is nothing, but a pile of dust, that glints in the sunlight, and appears like the first pearls of dew-like snow?

beauty seems to be the only parameter for any semblance of human emotion we are willing to spare for another - beauty, or rather the bastardization of beauty, has rendered us barren, so dreadfully ugly. beauty consumes those who fawn upon it, destroys worlds, invades peaceful colonies, robs the poets of sleep, and urges the beguiled to sin.

my disfigured mind, once a slave to beauty, has broken its shackles from its dastardly regime. in the process, I've had to encounter my own ugliness - both without and within - bloated egos of the world that match my bloated skin - but it is dissatisfaction that I’m bursting with. dissatisfaction at the absence of prodigious blood in my veins, the kind that can foretell worldly events, conjure multiverses, concoct reservoirs of colors undreamt of, and feel the fabric of the world, the way one obtusely feels their own skin shielding their inner darknesses. ennui mingles with narcissism, flowers bloom at the edge of deserted lakes - the forest nymphs weep and wail under the blood-red moon, and the lovers die, without loving one another - alone, forlorn, their death a meaningless crease in the fold of the universe.

staring down at the unimpressive rising and falling of the telltale buttons - the very mechanism that allows me to stay afloat - I choke with tears that do not quite justify the source of my misfortune (perceived?). the faint, dull wail of the automation keeps me warm, but the sudden silence fills the home, no, just an apartment, with thunderous, ominous vulnerability. my bones ache along with the foundations of the house - the parakeets have made a nest among the polluted shrubberies, unlike their usual design to avoid large, empty cities. they screech , in imitation of my acute helplessness, mocking my hapless complaints, rendering me completely alone, while being surrounded by blood of the most coagulated, and thickest kind.

the neighborhood cats feast upon leftovers, as I look into the window of a world unexplored , ridden with darkness visible, and demons that admire your flesh while you  are half asleep. the walls twist and boil over, while i savour, in disgust, the heaviness of my existence, the meaningless lull of my name, called out by someone who brought about  an acutely unwanted genesis. the cries of the parakeets fade away, and the automation starts crawling around my skin again, enveloping me in a almost-comfortable embrace…the spell is broken, by the vision of my forefathers, on their animal parchments, and blood-like inked etchings, their truly broken hearts and the deceit of my own.
Acina Joy Sep 2017
Why is it, that when I am with you, I feel like nothing?
Why is it that I feel bare to the flame that you resonate?
Like tongues of fire that  lapped at my flesh and burnt me red and painted me black, like ashes of firewood and embers of dying flames, illuminating the dark.

Why do you hurt me so?
Tell me, for I am not complaining.
I'm letting your hurt me, because if there is a reason, I'll gladly accept it. If you have a reason for lighting a flame on chest, free me and we can both fly away like windeswept flowers wilting in the fall; snow raining down on naked branches and frozen shrubberies.

Burn me, for I have been the one to light you.

With you, I feel like I have a meaning.

Burn me, so you can grow brighter.
-Tell me now, for nothing else matters

— The End —