Inspired by the poem "45 Mercy Street" by Anne Sexton
You evicted yourself from wretched bones
paled by mourning light,
lost your compass on a dark forest path.
You had a lifelong subscription to penance,
moved surreptitiously without a forwarding address;
still, it found you in a shadowy corner -
you fingered crisp pages, trying to comprehend
the ancient price of madness, the inevitable origami,
unable to organize the perjuries your life had become.
You drank your draughts from amber glass
to deceive the colorlessness of laughter, shrieking
as flames consumed your flesh.
You were thick with moss, immune to silence.
Fragmentation was a slow mercy.
You heaved such stones, damning the stream
until your alabaster arms were torn
and oh, so weary.
You sifted through an interminable cavern
where you could not hibernate,
regardless of how slowly, how shallowly you breathed.
The ravenous bears always found you yawning,
bereft with somnolence and dragged you from your den.
The money never mattered much,
although there never seemed to be enough
to stitch you whole again. The bitter tremolo
of your blood intrigued you, renounced your cautionary tales.
When your wildly beating, endangered, entangled wings
finally tore loose from their bent-ribbed moorings,
no one could hear your murmured epiphany,
edged in grey mist.
No comments:
Post a Comment