Corundum Stone

I feel like a part of me is dying

Or already dead

Like I’ve been fighting to keep something alive

That’s no longer inside

A vacant hive, no longer boasting a queen

Plundered halls and broken mirrors

Crystal shards spraying prism dust through empty walls

Broken frames and peeling paint

Tattered canvases, beasts couldn’t bear to see

A broken jar that never houses a rose

But incubated, a heart pumping thorns

Ventricles pierced and burdened and empty

And yet perceived to be robust and pure and at peace

Peace never lived here

And the pieces of ground sand catching in my hands

Tearing my fingertips can’t help but deposit a prickly, slimy seed

This empty cage rattled with every rasping hope

Hope

And chaos as the thorns fall flat and dull

Against my petrified and recrystallized ribs

It’s like

I’ve

Been

Opening my lungs and waiting

For the sharp pain that always comes

When the thorns pump and tear

But I come up empty

I wake up exhausted from a night of endless wake

Of endless wait

I sit and stare

And wait and wait and wait

For who I was to rise up

And inhabit my bones once again

And yet, I lay still, dormant

Nothing is inside

And I realize

Who I was is no longer alive

No longer a part of what has been growing in my bones

The process of making

The hollow pain growing in my mind

As I try to fill up with this thing

This demonghost of me

Hissing and waiting behind me

Searching for a way to get back

In

My bones

Hardened into corundum stone

With each rasp,

Each scratch,

Each desperate attempt to take root,

To sink in,

To tear my flesh open,

The thorns chip away the dust and decay

Of laying in wait

Sapphire bones emerge amongst the plea for familiar fantasies

And I see you

And your red hair,

Your hazel eyes,

Your freckles

And I hear you

As I always do

And I smile as the pedestal falls to dust

Under the click of an aperture I forgot I had

I am not where I was

I am not yours anymore

I am radiant red

And I don’t know how to be

In the darkest hole

The deepest well

The only place I’ve ever known

Thorns wrapped around my hands

Clenched in my fists

Fragmented and ragged from clinging to stone

No longer protruding

Probing into my ever-beating heart

I no longer live in ruins