No longer soft and otherworldly
I think you took my gentleness away
Dark black stains and wrinkled earth burned with brown dead pine needles covering the last of you left by a canyon
A little canyon we skimmed in the viridian moonlight
Now marched over by ants lapping you up and inheriting your mania
Tearing down their hill ripping their queen apart in a fevered lunar rage and leaving the colony burnt black too
I throw a glass on the ground and watch it shatter
I throw a glass on the ground and hear it shatter
The dust particles reach my tongue and microtear into my lips and throat, I inhale them like a disease into my flesh and cough cough cough like I did before,
it feels like you.
Everything I did was entwined, a part of you, a constant act worship worked into every memory recall now transfigured into a
death ritual.
Worship is only given to the living
Memorial and monuments for the dead
Idolatrous,
now every memory is a funerary rite and I give adoration with every thought to death.
I want my need to speak to turn into silence
my need to scream to fade into oblivion
my need to dream to empty into a dark burnt black hole branded into the ground.
My cold gunmetal form crafted into an image for you that a jackhammer can’t dig out, sputtering and braying like a broken-legged donkey, no temperature change a solid midspring afternoon at all times
the chill of this metal I’ve encased myself in to move and be moved by a single autonomous command, now too heavy to move on its own awaiting my master in an empty bed, lapping up blood stains and rubbing my nose in them so I can remember that lump–
How often I see that bundled lump laying in front of me, how often I should have reached out and held her but held myself and rocked myself asleep under the weight of this rusting iron and cobalt cage.
The stars still twinkle, burn and blast
while I sit alone and gasp
and think with thinking’s endless tyranny
on matter wiped out prematurely:
an angel’s love, rare received,
children forever unconceived–
and this, within a second’s pass
while laying moonstruck in the grass.
The sharpened crystalline lattices of glass work their way up and down and up and down my trachea
I stare ahead with beat red eyes
I want them to climb up to my eyes and scrub them clean
the fragments dislocated
All I can do is swallow
Helpless writhing
Still
— Nick is a writer in the midwest, other writings can be found at https://geniusleveliq.substack.com/.