The Word, The Name

There is a word, soft as summer petals

With all the biting drag of its thorns.

The fallen hush of October air

Rushes across the tongue from black depths,

Exiting with the same dignity of a final breath.

It cuts warmly into the air but chills the bones

Like Fall.

.

The word found me in the dark of night

Beneath stiff asylum sheets and the violent, silent press

Of bodies creeping through the gaps in the window screens

And the bulletholes in the concrete.

The word twined around my throat,

Cool contrasting against the warm lines of sweat.

He needed to speak it.

.

It seized the silence of the room until I was transported,

Carried by scarred arms and strong dreams

To a foreign place of dust and death.

I could only feel the thump of a pained heart,

Only see shrapnel eyes bursting with the urge to speak.

There were storm clouds bringing a haze to his eyes

And I knew I had felt that downpour before.

.

The white-capped mountain, rocky on its face

And full of mossy undergrowth on its back,

Leaned close to whisper the word

Chaining his soul to his scars

Against the silence shadowing my lips.

.

It started with a sneer,

A flash of teeth pressing against a fat lower lip

Accustomed to restraint.

Disgust looped around sharp canines

As the hissing start of a cursed word,

The first cold breeze of October heralding the long night,

Swept across my skin and fell into my mouth with a sigh.

.

The word was bitter,

Rubbed against the back of my tongue

With the dark flavours of blood-soaked soil,

Desert sands clumping in the cracks between teeth,

Fouling up sweet, starving breath.

The space between us remains,

Heavy in its honesty.

.

The word shifts.

.

It opens the mouth to expose upper canines

And the black abyss vanishing into his throat

Where a rumbling anger begins to swell upward,

Grating against a polyp-riddled larynx

In a way that mimics boots

Crunching through urban decay,

Breaking glass and bones and hope underfoot.

.

In this ethereal space,

Where night barely exists

And dreams are more akin to nightmares,

I am lost to the cry echoing down the hallways,

Reminding me of the lost, in-between hours of dusk.

The world vanishes somewhere in the middle of a deep,

Torrential downpour striking my thoughts.

.

Dark regret flashes across pale eyes and I fall back

To the rhythm of sweat-slicked forearms sliding,

Connecting beneath the heat of summer.

Through muscle, through bone, through blood

The memories flow as night returns to me.

I can see the lights crackling against midnight black.

.

We are trapped again in the room

Two beasts devouring the last marrow in our grief.

I am locked, antlers in antlers, with his pain,

Waiting for the shift in the word.

.

The tip of his tongue lifts, presses against

Flat teeth dried by wind and sand and storm.

Open eyes lid.

His lashes kiss at the corners.

The crinkles of laughter flatten.

The engine in his chest screams until I can hear it

Pounding, howling, in his pulse.

.

His eyes have gone hazy with coastal fog

And his lips round into a circle,

Cracking open like slaughtered mussel shells on a beach

Beneath the ruling eyes of gulls.

Blood smears the coarse stubble of a man with no mercy,

The one tasting the iron souls of his ghosts.

.

Deep muscles in his back seize,

Tightening the mountain into a terrifying mass of stone

At the partial mention of the name, the place, the nightmare.

But I can feel the ripples of fear

Moving like rip currents in his forearms.

It lingers on his breath and haunts his waterline.

On my lips too, there are dead memories of the lives

I swore I could save.

.

Tongue to teeth, cynical lips kiss

Around the round center of the sound.

Darkness presses the last light of dusk

From his unblinking eyes.

Leaving a gaping black chasm in his pupils.

.

And the word falls apart.

.

It splits at the seams as ugly and bloated with suffering

As the crimson-stained memories themselves.

He snarls the final syllable through barred teeth

That drop open with a growl.

The deep fathomless fury

Twines along the word and cracks a heavy whip

Across the silence scarring the skin of my thoughts.

.

In the cramped dark of the room he sits,

The twin of Prometheus,

His heart pecked at and devoured by vultures.

No longer man or beast but demigod

Sitting on a throne of desert despair.

.

Death chewed him up and spat him out

But the word on his lips

Is no prettier for it.

.

Nathalie Daux

.

Not quite as long but still hefty, this poem is a companion piece to To See A Book. Of course you don't have to read both, but they do work together to tell a story. Odds are, there are more of this particular type in the pipes.