Learning to love is woman after woman dying inside of me.
I have been consumed by desire and left to live on the ashes that remain, a restless hunger for all dimensions of the texture of forbidden things, stolen feelings, the cruel soak of sadness, the tender pleasure of villainous blood mixed into my blood.
As I watch you bow your head, I catch the portrait of an expression I am tethered to, these piercing haunts, my spirit swells, aching with lust and emotion. We the creatives, doomed and redeemed only ever to ourselves. I am a silent song on the wind in the sharp blue streaks of an endless night, a ghost guide, a break in the bend of the clipping of wings, invisible, intrusive, mad. In my fumbling hands I carry the sand of the dreams of the dawning of an earth I remember with affection enough to tear me at the seams. We are vanishing, we are free.
All is naked elegant promise on its knees; all is silken threaded veins through an ancient heart that beats eternal.
Swallowed whole, I’m arranging flowers on the grave of the things I used to believe. Let go, let go, let it all go, tears are but reflecting pools. Dark pushing light, light pushing dark, the relentless hands of a pulsating God.
I am lost; into this handsome death I am falling, falling; to wander without a name is to collect pieces of myself for burial.
There will be rain and sweetness in their singing, souls shifting like blinks of eyelashes against the turning of a concrete moon.
I can feel a secret in the humid air that hangs itself around my pleading heart. I am borrowed from your night sweats, a burden and a siren, I am the rays of a truth to which you are blind. Your hands are throbbing against my disease, this pain interrupts my mouth but will not leave. Intimacy is the darkness that calls to me, builds castles in my bed, begs, delivers, and fills me.
Poetry is a way to keep breathing, the words spilled forth and those withheld forever weaving the soft pale of my tired skin.
Blessed are we the wounded, the ones who sense the coming storms and do not run.
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Allison Marie Conway 