Cover Your Eyes

It wasn't for the lack of trying.
It was for the stillness in the night
when you called me your life.

But now, he sits there, oblivious,
my life,
and I wonder at your persistence,
as I wondered at the concept of evil—
some things even God falls for.

It is in this insistence of the everyday
that I most indulge your absence,
I let it fill me, like a rag soaks kerosene
right before it catches fire.

I still chew the ragged edges of my fingernails
hoping that in the dead skin
I can taste your insides again.

I have confiscated our words,
set them to oblivion,
that generations to come
would fall in their sweet trap.

I invented love in you.
I ignited you like an Indian widow,
bright flame dancing on supple skin.
And only when your float,
far adrift down the river,
burst the spleen of the night in color,
did I hear the wailing.
And it wasn’t yours;
one can hardly recognize
their voice in tatters.

Still scour those edges,
the banks I’ll never be.
I have tried to bury your eyes in the mud.
But they look up, beyond me,
as evil and docile as the day I buried them,
luring others with their stare.

Yes, I have learnt to forgive
ever since I saw my smile in the waters,
innocent and twisted,
and still covering your eyes.

Monstering

“Daddy, help me!”
“They made her stir a burning pot of shit until she passed out.”
“They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from them.”
“You could hear the screams all the way down the hall, she said.”
“They even had the human pyramid as a screensaver in the detention office.”

“And now to Mary Cantell with Shadow Traffic.
Mary, how’re the roads looking out there?”
“Ah, John, it’s a real nightmare on 76…”

Love Eviscerated

When I killed you, I didn’t cry.

I just looked down, at your head
listless, your hair wiry, your eyes
glazed.
_____I just looked down
with a semblance of pity, or
perhaps regret.
_____It wasn’t everyday
that I got to love this much.

When I killed you, a lop-sided smirk
dawned on my face, a smile
that was almost tender.

I didn’t look back
to see if you’re done.
I just assumed the best,
which never happens.

And now I find you’re very well
and alive.
There are worse things in life,
I imagine.
But the nightmare never ends,
out of boredom.

You'll get it in the mail
someday,
and it will be old and stale
and delicately fragrant,
and mildly haunting.
Like a piece of the cross,
arcane, and blood-soaked,
and generally irrelevant.

Such is our story,
mostly myth.