DESCENT

 

Alone is a prison now; it once felt like home,

the beginning, verge and

summit of everything. Days swarm before

its bars; rest is not restful

and sleep, restive, mere interludes between

waking interludes of lesser

or greater oblivion. Tranquility, that rare bird,

fleets into dreamscapes of rainbows

on soapsuds and sylphlike clouds crossing a

sinking sun. Prayers fall away

and pages turn from me; a knot in the wood

I sanded, patched and veneered

thrives in my belly, its dense bands rising

to stifle from within each time I linger

in a brown study. An unspoken truth prickles

my skin, as elsewhere,

tremors wrinkle Earth’s integument.

Tomorrows frondesce like ficus seen through

misted glass; the dark white

of drowning burned into my eyelids grows

immenser, deeper, an amalgam

of breaking and remaking that gluts gaping

holes where warmth and pulse

should be. Moonlight and stillness ricochet off

windowpanes and petalled stars

suspended in a night dense with unknowing.

Quotidian sounds ring

to the unvarying rhythm of days, of pain that

claimed my blood for its resource,

this smith who oscillates between labour and

ritual as craftsman and shaman,

leaching the spirit from my bones to temper

his blade. Breath, the largest subset

of my existence, releases me from her embrace

with no promise to return.  

A voice whispers salty rust, faint as a spectre,

remembered like the icy descent

into a fluid womb from the corner of a dream.

They tell me red water

erupted from my throat and this time round,

a single word: No…

 

© 2020 Lilium candidum

Lily’s Verse

Image: twitter.com