library poem 03: ie

[prismaticbleed]

how does one begin to understand color,
when the paper-tone itself has changed?
how am i to recognize the written word,
when the voice of ink is no longer gorgeous dark?

there's something wrong with the sky tonight

your constellations are overturned
jumbled, jangled, scratching at the walls,
turned from luminary to lunacy
as the eclipse cheshire smile sets in.

I can't look at you like this

all i have are paper cut-out teeth burning crescent aches in my shirtsleeves
the scent of ichor clove and smoke heavy as blood in my throat
and that terrible, beautiful, impossible hum in my ribcage when you laugh through my evershut eyes.

someone dropped a bomb on our cathedral.
did you pull the pin? did you hear the sirens screaming from the curtained porch?
what did the sunrise look like when you sold your soul, O fractured seraph?
could you taste the purple axe-blade as it split your cyclops skull?

when you awoke among the lilies,
(O beloved broken cherub)

my poor symbiote. my darling mirror-geist,
O you who forever inhabits the pause within the pulse

what color had you become?
did your heart still burn white-shimmer glass, porcelain juggernaut geode of a thing?
were your eyes still open-shut-mouths, horror-wonder hymning every iridescent gaze?
you used to tiptoe gravity with pindrop precise grace

my crumbled trembling wreck of a doppelganger love.

wake up, come closer, let me speak through me through you
cover my bones in calligraphic shade rhapsody once more
let me be the paper to your black.