Clinical,
surreal emptiness.
Chocolate-scented wood.
Smell of new and
non-alcoholic intoxication.
Life as art for art’s sake.
Neon light flickers as you blink
infected by dizziness.
No longer tone-deaf to the harmonies
of your own soul,
you don’t shrink for someone else to grow.
An invisible corpse in the plastic bag
winks at you from the corner-
madness, it grows
in sanity.
Lifeless but intense:
you don’t pray for another,
you prey for yourself.
A silhouette merging with the unknown-
all that is left is your breath in the cold air
as you exhale in slow motion.
I speak in shadows,
you respond with specters of light,
haunting every word-
making sense of it all;
I choose to live in the now,
but if you whisper in my ear
I will take decades to figure out
why you chose to disappear
that day
when I ran down the hallway-
gargoyles staring from above-
for a second I thought I could hear
another set of footsteps
under a different weight
even after I accepted your longing
for the netherworld.
The statues were grotesque,
threatening, demon-like in thunder and lightning,
and still, I hoped that hallway would never end
just so I could hear the sounds again and again
and convince myself they weren’t merely
echoes of my footsteps into the unknown.
I taste the blood of dehydrated lips,
admire the inadequately plucked eyebrows
above vapid black circles surrounded by
red on translucent white.
Dark hair, itchy like rope
against my neck,
frozen hands trembling,
features particularly thin:
I forgot how to live,
yet I laugh at my own sin.
That tender memory
of snowdrops,
dreamy air,
and spring dew
made my world shiver this morning
once again.
The vanishing words,
the vanishing images,
the shedding
of selves like autumn leaves;
of withered lives on wrinkled paper,
dust off the treasure chest
in the desert, next to a snake
regenerating its skin
polished,
your porcelain appearance melting into
the undefined-
does the new verse annihilate
or build you?
perhaps it is the fading portrait
either that, or the smile in between
either that, or the infinite encounters
with the ineffable
You write, you cross out
another identity and over to
another vision.
I gather tokens of death
in appearance fragile-
with thorns hidden
underneath.
A hand reaches out…
Blood lingers
on thin skin.
Petals burn,
Smoke intoxicates:
you breathe it in.
Funeral words carved
in marble skin-
paralysed,
you listen blindly
as they inhale life.
DIANA MARIN 