Free Verse
untitled
peel me open reveal a new layer still raw and gaping seeping out and onto the floor still wanting even though I'm left for dead still empty even when I've bled out on the wood no seed or soul no heart just mass — cells connected to muscle, tied to fat, pressed to bone hollow me like bone ripe for marrow split cracked broken fingers pry apart tear into flesh and body wear me down skin me alive— I'll still be raw and open when you're finally finished.
By Chel Writes4 months ago in Poets
Even the Heart Survives by Caesura
When you were born, you cried— dragged from your small blue harbor into a world of bright knives and winter voices. And I let the tears flow like salty rivers of the first spring, washing the crimson shores of your newborn cheeks. The tide was already pulling you. I felt the call, too— the old lunar ache, freezing in the marrow. But I had you . So I wrapped myself around your smallness. I kept the dark pulse lantern lit. I taught your lungs the discipline of returning. Pause — release — return. Even the heart survives by caesura. When you were five and split your knee open on the gravel, you cried into your mother's coat while rain gathered in the gutters. I stitched our skin back together. When you were sixteen and loved boys who loved disappearing, you cried again— and I carried you through the brine-dark grief, held you close while you thought you were abandoned by the gods. I carried you through winters that settled in your mouth like black ice. Through mornings when your bones ached with the terrible burden of continuing. Through the nights you stood at the shoreline too long, listening to the sea name every possibility. I feel how tired you have become. I read it in the slowing of your hands, in the way you leave tea going cold beside the bed, in the way your words grew an ash-like hue, as though you are already learning to haunt yourself. Life began with rupture, but even devastation obeys cycles. The burned forest blackens— then greens. The tide recedes— then returns carrying silver fish and pieces of lost glass softened by the sea. Somewhere, beneath the ice the river already prepares for spring. I have carried you this far through every winter you tried to vanish from, I have wrapped my ribs around you like a nest of wet branches. Let me keep you one more morning. One more apricity spilling gold across the floorboards. One more psithurism as I take you through the fallen amber leaves on the path of all we tried to keep. Look— another morning gathering softly at the windows, and me still cradling you in the warm hollow of my being.
By Imola Tóth4 months ago in Poets
