I was just a gaunt, decrepit figurine on your losing team,
a bloodhound in the swamp who wailed for new instructions (Teach me how to live)
When I was summoned to eradicate the clues
I faithfully destroyed, and feigned serenity, our palace and our hands clean
You conspired with sprites and spirits
in a campaign of attrition, against my brightest ambitions.
The garden heaved Calsap Rhododendrum
I ripped them out like weeds,
their Rorschach pedals
made mysterious the wretched
While beneath the soil dead charlatan's bottles, were promising to heal
my shattered mitochondria
The doctors obscured on yellow paper, I left them drying on a sill
to archive their lies.
I spent my nights with the croaking frogs, who mated to proliferate
And above me, the Crab Nebula
so full of life that it broke,
twisted pulsations slowly
while my own light was too dim for Alhazen.
So to burst was pointless.
There's no Isis to collect my limbs
to nail and glue the broken shards
I tie my stalk, against a rotting trunk
Never good enough for my own plot.
I'm the yellow bruise from the grief ballet, the shattered wheel in the cavalcade
but life flows in my veins, like St. Elmo's fire
I'm the lonely mare that is caked in shit, the crippled mast that the waves have hit
I don't want you to view me. I just want you to soothe me.
