
You were playing romantic games of spin the bottle on pebbled stone streets with an old rusting can of soup that you meant to save to keep you warm from fear. It’s liquid languidly making its way down the gutter; a dessert only the ants can fully appreciate as you squat low to the ground awaiting your serpent songs desire. And there it came. Like mist, off the lake, rolling in at dusk covering everything, causing an eerie glow. Your own light clogged within its strings wavering as the mist played a staccato on your heart. Encircling you until all that you could see was it icy demeanor and in that moment it every possibility came true. Like the mist bringing heaven’s gates. And you leaned in and danced bleeding out your tortuous heart on the ground until all that remained was a distant whisper of my name.
Your chains unbound. Your swan song degraded. Enrapture taking over your eyes; a much stronger force than any arrows cupped in the crest of cupids unfurling hand. And as that grey kiss entered you slipping past your lips, filling you, inching past your voice, shrilling you, breaking through our doors and breaking you as you cosmically collide and lay catatonically by its side. Was it the cold that left you behind? When the mist fatally cleared?
Or was it my light that drew you as it came into view from within it’s starched stained encasement of my heart and I distantly drifted into delicate dreams that had nothing to do with mist, or bottles, or spilled ruminates of memories and awoke to blood stained sheets; an abortion of our floridity. And it startled me. Our fruition yet to be conceived and I collapsed into rages of fits brought on by Zeus’ satanically sharpened blots that descended upon me fragmenting me into bits and pieces spread out on the tear sodden floor. Completely come undone.
And you returned with words built for lovers, with x’s and o’s and forget me not scribbled brilliantly on bitter blue clouds preceding you in the sky. But there was a snake hiding under your collar and I saw its bloody eyes staring back at me as you tried to shake his tantric rhythm controlling your lips but its tail could be seen slicing your throat and locking on to your shameful heart. As you asked, “How do I stop?”
At that moment I wanted to run away into woods where witches and wolfs and sweet grandmothers stood but reality had quite the intense hold. So I let go hoping that maybe the puzzle could be glued down this time.
With each day we moved gracefully from lovers to friends and back again trying to maintain a place where we felt safe. I attempted to make my commitment stronger and to blast through walls placed up by grieving mothers who felt my pain and knew there was not much more I could do.
But I tried.
I laid with you, skin to skin, and tried to disway the images and thought that flew into my mind but their intrepid skeletons haunt your body making it so that every time my fingers lay on their ghastly shell I am forced to quickly disembark. I fell into darkly draining clogged up tears as I curled into you convinced that one way or another I’d make it through that forest and reawaken myself. So I squinted my eyes to blocked out that blazing sun that tempted to destroy me, closed up every memory and forced myself to forget everything. And I released with biting equity as what I thought would solve everything shattered on to the floor as grief took hold.
I laid numb and out of breath heaving for something to save me from myself. My muscles tensed as my insides screamed to be redeemed batting invisible fist against your chest.
I laid numb out of breath heaving for something to save me from myself. Why didn’t that can point you back home to me? Tell me, why did the can lead you away to her?
Can you see the illusion in the mist?
*Image by c2photo









