Love's 9 Tales Untangled

A Poem by Nobody.

Collab with Kerry O'Connor

Love’s 9 Tales Untangled

(Barbs)

A punch-drunk moon sings silver sonnets to my madman heart. The streets of New Orleans are flooded, tonight, with the corpses of jilted lovers. I want to stand up and break free from this curbside grave. I want to burst forth from this withered vessel, and fly to a faraway mountaintop to heal myself in some mystical stream. But, there is no cure for this leper’s soul. My magical flower has ceased to bloom no matter how many tears I rain down; no matter how brightly I shine. I wish I could lose myself in the evening shuffle, but my beaten down pain sits naked in plain view, howling like a wounded dog. The golden tomorrow into which we were soaring has become the brick wall into which I am crashing.

I’m not the rhyming couplet answer to your insane riddles. The cauliflower-ear of that same scarred moon is shining through the ragged curtains of my heart. I have shut the window on the sound of dogs guffawing; to the winestink of cat piss that simmers in the alleys of better days. I keep pots of desert sand on my kitchen sill, in which I have planted nothing. Yet I water them everyday with semi-religious fervor. Maybe chance will grow. I wish I could find myself, one unearthly day, on the far side of the hill, rolling over the slippery grass, with the momentum of the great beyond spinning me away from gravity’s inevitable embrace. Let me fly free.

III

I will not run to my whiskey respite. I will not die amongst these forgetful dead to appease you. You will never rise above the filth of your own actions. Half-eaten memories will rot on your plate. You will stare across the wasteland table at nothing; at no-one. Love will become a foreign word in the hexed life that I will leave for you. Every inch of your supple flesh will turn stony and crust over to match your wicked traitorous heart. Your silken voice will take on the sound of sludge creeping through rusty pipes. Your eyes will lose their color and glint to become as dull and lifeless as your passion. Your mojo will fizzle, your teeth will rot in your mouth, your guts will crawl like tangled snakes in your forever-aching belly. You will die alone in the same gutter in which you’ve baptized away my hope. And, just before your serpentine soul slithers through some dingy crack to Hell, you will remember me. But, no forgiveness will be offered; No salvation dispensed. You are damned as you have damned me. Your demonic wings are clipped.

A fallow field, my body will lie, unploughed, unmarked by your hobnailed stride, and left for the windblown seed to find purchase, or the berry-ripe excrement of tiny birds. Four seasons long, my hips and arms and breast mounds will be offered to the icy touch of star-shine only. My passion, dull and lifeless, will lie hidden from your violent blue lightning strikes of words: words to curse, words to damn " all will fall upon the stony crust and wither. I will own the wasteland; my silken voice will be its wind; my teeth its tombstones. Love, if it comes again, will come as the rain sweeps a grey broom through the dust. And I’ll bloom.