(no subject)

[fahye]

I am writing this instead of picking up a gun

Somewhere deep inside my chest (or so to speak)
I've built a twining birdbath, made of neat
bronze and rusted in places
with dirty spirals and minute traces
of teal green. What matters is that I
have filled it to the brim with fire
and set across the top a plate
of brittle glass, like crème brulée.

It's something like a storage tub
for every black mood: the sum
and sticky tar of my frustration rage
boredom despair isolation panic hate
&c. Once pulled down and in they burn -
some slower than others - and turn
eventually to filthy smoke that can
be ignored like so much trash.

Surprising how that leaves my chest
and soul so free and clean; like air
below night skies at your old home
in Tuscany, with candles and those odd throw
rugs over the furniture. Walls of pink cement
that you never quite liked but kept
because it was the done thing. Teach
me how to do that, when next we speak?

In return I'll teach you housekeeping:
all the sticky emotion swept under this
glass and charred away. I have tried to find
your disregard for neat structure, tried
to put it in this poem and failed,
as you may have noticed. (Hint: say
the words and listen to the vowels.)
Got it now?

This evening a few notes sliced my
mind like loneliness, like a knife,
with all the pain that would entail,
and all the invisible things to say
got no further than the base of my throat.
I pulled them down (ruthless) and wrote
about the feeling in my chest
when violence rendered me undressed.

My hands tight on the wheel and
never speaking, never looking back,
I might have fallen quite apart
below the sky and above the tar.
Instead there was the fire and smoke
and only this, of things that I might show:
a small tight smile, cemented in pink,
alien upon my lips.