She leaves the day before Valentine's Day. |
My heart is but an urchin left to slosh within a mossy fen. A narrow, beating loiterer neither here nor there. I peel myself like epidermis scorched by ultraviolet; a photograph within my mind, clear with skin tones, cherry lips, of my significant other. Nay, no more, no more. Alas her leaving was the day before, that day of days (Valentine’s Day) yet I know east and I know west for I am not a beaten path on which to dig a heel, or gouge along as if a plow yanked by a raging ox. Her fragrance piques: now loneliness, the pungency of month old milk. Barbed wire rakes across my arm and blood drips to my thumb. Hot and cold I will survive, the murder of a million crows. Quite wide awake brass cymbals crash, she’s off to find love somewhere else. Perhaps love lives in silhouette or in the shadow of the moon, wherein the third dimension waits for her to bleed as I now bleed, and then with mirth sets to enslave and crack a cat-o’-nine-tails swift, to lacerate such tender flesh until a metamorphosis leads to callousness and solitaire. Oh I know up and I know down, and so I’ll face the morning sky and laugh while rain dilutes silk tears. 40 Lines Writer’s Cramp 2-12-16 |