Bleed.

 

Blink, blink.

Bitten.

 

Sagged down by a certain avoirdupois.

Under the strain of bitter nights and one-eyed apparitions.

I sat under that lone moon tree.

And seven times, the tree screamed.

Each time, speaking your name.With a bejeweled softness like warm grass.

Like saliva-dressed spite.

Like wells.Like open and like close.

It said you were round and square and oval.

It said you were sweet.Not the sweetness that makes the tip of the tongue rise and arc like a back that has done too much rolling in its own night sweats.

No.

The sweetness that stings you and makes you hot all over until black lines begin to crawl through your pores.

Yes.That one.

 

Have you been to that house?

The one that overlooks the harbor?

I have, and did not touch a thing.

Not one thing

Because,I knew that whatever sheets were spread and whatever curtains were draped were there to sing you songs

Songs that curse.

Songs that bite.

Songs that hate.

Songs that dream like you.

Songs that turn their necks like you.

Songs that bleed like you.

 

Have you bled so much that your blood now seems to know where it's going?

Like

Self-guided missiles plummeting through satirical clouds of forests and moons.

Like

Ravenous fires that lay wait between the lines of clenched fists.

Have you met the keeper of wounds?

Has he not dabbed the holes with his wings?

Why then does your blood still flow like an overactive imagination?

 

I wanted to hold your hand.

I wanted to squeeze it.

Until every bone was more than familiar with the taste of my grip and the lines that run this fallow palm.

So that your blood could feel my blood and maybe they could become friends.

 

Maybe.

In the midst of a war of pits, falling inside yourself was the natural thing to do.

Wrapped in the inability to count your losses, your white flags echoed through these walls.

Bleed.

Backlashed against the midnight creaks of sturdy spines,

And cantaloupe defence wounds,your yesterdays whispered through these cracks.Bleeed.

 

Because after the rain drowns our murmuring souls and cascades into a body of inaudible “I should haves” and "why does this happens".

We will sit.

Guardians of the cathedral of ifs.We will eat these colored glasses.

Until our insides vomit the answers we want to hear.

 

 

Do you not see the hours that die in your eyebrows?

What witchcraft runs the circle of your ears?

I have known winged warlords that open their chests that I may take a look at their hearts.

That trembling red machine.

Why do you glass it so?

Castled with crimson cacophonies you spit bile on this passing world and wear your wings inside out.

Perhaps, when you culled these rumpled sheets.

You did not take into account the festered manifestations of a broken river.

 

 

O bleeding river.

 

 

I will not speak to you about human rights.

For you have lost the most fundamental of them; the right to bleed.

 

 

Shh.

 

Bleed.

 

Close your eyes.

And bleed.

 

Just

 

Bleed.

 

So that when you lay on this red earth.Like a nation that swallows its own people

Every trickle will form a reservoir of animated smiles and quaking tears.

Of the debts you owed yourself Of the depths you holed yourself.

Of the deaths you hold yourself.

 

Let them write poems and let them slaughter,

Every unborn child that will grow knowing her left from her right.

And knowing how to cry without burning her tongue and hearing the incessant buzz of bees.

Let them infest.

Let them corrupt.

Let them violate.

 

Let them testify to the revolution inbetween your toes.

To your heavy back and your charcoal hands.

 

To how every curve of your body was a disease that blatantly rejected treatment.

To how mirrors never had a vaccine.

Or eyes an antidote.

To how every bone spoke like the hot pulse of a martyr.

 

To how you bled.

 

To how you bleed.

 

- JSL.

Reviews

[Priscilla Sayers]

The power of passion drips then rushes, each line forms the increase of torrential currents released from a mind tortured. Yet, who bleeds? With each reader a new perception is born. In my own mind I see a reflection that is too unseemly to discuss out right but blood flows thick, runs freely from pores that open upon demand. Veins bled often, as they will no doubt bleed more. Wounds are opened by words, but it is the thought that conjures the steel that gouges at the wound, willing it to bleed once more...
Great piece.

[Lily Mae]

"I wanted to hold your hand.
I wanted to squeeze it.
Until every bone was more than familiar with the taste of my grip and the lines that run this fallow palm.
So that your blood could feel my blood and maybe they could become friends."

I loved this as a whole but this part wowed me.. Excellent penning..xo

[john alan willox]

not a fan of long poetry - but the images here kept me captivated all the way through - nice work.

[Nick.B]

Very powerful and deep write you managed to create here, bleeding outside maybe be dangerous and fatal, but bleeding on the inside is one of the worst....anyway great write

[Matthew Palmer-Jones]

"I wanted to hold your hand.
I wanted to squeeze it.
Until every bone was more than familiar with the taste of my grip and the lines that run this fallow palm.
So that your blood could feel my blood and maybe they could become friends."
Dude..you summed the desire of every man to his love

[Poe Redd]

If I find more great poetry like this I think my writers block will drop, defeated, but hell, I haven't read anything that spoke to me like this for a loooooong time. The poem warms me the way it shouldn't but I'm through bleeding and this was delicious.

[KAOlmsted]

Joshua. When I began reading this I was like, "This is a hot mess" *laugh* and then as I got into the body of the piece I started to sit up a little straighter in my chair...I can't even describe the tempest of emotion this stirred in me...it is beyond explanation, which, for anyone who knows me, knows how rare that is ;-) I want to hear this...that is to say, I want this to be a spoken word piece so badly I am almost tempted to read it aloud myself...something I have never done, not even with my own work. But...of course I would not do it justice. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.

-kimmer

[Carolann Dowsett]

Wow this is amazing, so deep and powerful.

[.]

~ brilliantly said and brilliantly written... i live in a nation that swallows its own people... it's very tough to live without human rights... very, very tough... i have millions of tears in my eyes right now... not able to type... i hope i see a better india before i die...

[Annabelle Lee]

i loved it.