For the One Come Back to Life

Tell me about the dance. How you have drawn chalk lines on the floors but all they ever did was spin in circles and trample one another’s feet.

Spread your hands all over me and let me feel the chill of the voices.

How has it been to see in the clouds what has become of the poets, the way people panic now behind a cross of stones. Ever since your song has been laid to rest they all pretend they have forgotten how to sing.

Perhaps it makes it easier to imagine you are not here.

But I still sing as I tap sticks along the fences in my mind (funny how darkness looks in upon itself and names it ‘other’). The quiet of some days is just too much.

Your legs above the earth are as strange as your heart sunk below. Do the hills rise into the sky for you? If you can find the secrets in your wounds to open up to me, I will tell them everything you need them to know.

This splintered curtain of spectacular glass across your face still cuts me. Why is it I cannot stop peeling my own when I think of you? I had almost forgotten the way the sunlight fades through in diamond-shaped slivers. When you speak I still listen for you, I’m sure it’s then you deepen the rasp in your voice.

I would have done anything for the way you wore that sound.

Your ebony rose gardens have overgrown my ivory body. I suck on the rustblood of their succulent thorns, their petals crush as softly as summer midnight lakes filling the holes in my sadness.

Everything about you was soil they neglected. Everything you left was torment I can’t believe they buried.

I do not sleep but have been forced to wander dreams. We meet; we separate.

They could not understand you, that is what I understood about you most. You, the angel in my murderous hour, remind me what love with iron claws is like on fire flaring up inside my wrists.

Speak for me the terrors they tear open the ground to exhume.

It has been so long since this kind of glow remembered a creature as faint as me. When I think of the dance I think of us. When I think of the end I pray it traces away the waif I have become.

While they count syllables you have moved on, you begin to dictate the waves along the shore. While they grow tired and I grow distant, I sense you at my heels, you at my tableside, you shadow of my shadow, you purgatory’s music of peculiar beat.