as usual beauty eludes me completely yet i taste it at the edge of my consciousness and dream i am drinking it though whether wine or hemlock i am still unsure with its bittersweet prickles against my skin and caressing tenderness i suspect is the prelude to proclamations of desire i will never return
you walk on streets populated by men seeming as trees but plundering your depths with glances different only in their trapped rapelessness from those of their mousterian precursors yet your footsteps pause not an instant as the gauntlet is neither thrown down nor unknown to you
i stare shocked an interloper confused by the language swirling in the nearly-darkness while crazed desperation meets obsessive hatred in an instant and jealousy dies fiery deaths and ice-daggers only barely managed to remain veiled behind the moonlight yet sidewalks don’t open to swallow them across styx’ currents
perhaps it is me who has already left this world or never once entered it if my delusions of friendship taste only of smiles and shadows of aesthetics while swirling around me are scents of pheromones and ownership at one phallus’ removed and bodies become instruments of torture only in my fractured dreams
reaching for the dawn i suddenly collapse as i feel the carpet pulled from below my feet an unexpected noise woke me yet i imagined myself safe only to search for balance and find nothing but fresh bruises my limbs ripped from their sockets while i lay dazed yet my life somehow extends as i am torn to nothing more than slices of myself only alive at the edges though soon to become rived from the past
the touch of steel against my face resurrects me and i drink in new reflections caressed by hands able to tear yet gentle my bruises have healed and i no longer drink though sunlight feels closer and more raw with each day a welcome distraction yet i find myself returning to the hands their blade not tearing but returning me to life with each contemplative movement a shock yet somehow to be expected as i once again join my lost friends a trip through an unpredictable looking-glass reshaped yet unmistakable perhaps destiny is more capricious than i had imagined though it appears design may yet be intelligent in the afterlife
i had forgotten the joy of drinking my fill the purity of liquid flowing through my every pore reaching deep and darkening my impulses to echo the years i no longer count whether heaven or hell i am still unsure baking in the fire yet never smelling a single flame and suddenly as if a god had been waiting for a sign within me to shift just slightly lifted from the oppressive warmth and laid again on an altar for my sins
yet after careful preparation i am not sacrificed venerated and touched with love and painted with attention reunited and brushed by glimpses of forests in the distance where my children surely must play forgetting for the moment my absence in the sounds of birds playing between their fingertips and my sacred duty is fulfilled not by knives plunged through my heart but devotion aesthetic metamorphosis from rectilinear reshaping yet i remain myself losing nothing of the grain of my soul
uncountable years twist my dreams from memory yet with each moment i drink more sunlight against my face and smile more deeply skin shimmering more with age despite what the young would have us believe perhaps only the effect of careful preparation though that altar is so long ago i feel its touch only with the most tacit of feathery thoughts though no fire came for my burned heart and i was given new life in the sun listening carefully to the voices surrounding me unguarded as if i couldn’t hear and in this instant i relive that falling day when i thought myself pulled down to hell and shiver knowing no more of the afterlife now than all those moons ago
(this poem was composed in response to the “woodworking poetry” challenge from the shop talk live podcast from fine woodworking magazine.)
