Art by Vincent Van Gogh
the grey sheets
my body slips like butter fingers
my thoughts cradle like a song
being fed to goats before the pious act of sacrifice
between the grey sheets.
It tastes of rain drops and weed and pebbles.
It leaves me floating like torn paper in a windstorm.
And I cuddle skin and flesh
between shades of its grey,
hoping it’ll taste like paper cigarettes
and his memories will bend like a burnt bud
it’ll leave my body, disappear to dust in thin smoke
polluting someone else’s breath.
It’ll sound like a step mother’s lies
and the love will leave again like a broken toy
on a broken day without the grey sheets
you cuddled with him, in.
he
he looks down on me,
he looks down at me, mercilessly
he sees me change form, shape, weight, cloth
curl into a wool ball, lengthen my toe tips,
how my feet sink like disgusting quicksand,
how my palms, hands, fingers strangle breath
of feather soft pillows, how I claw my nails
in flesh of a lone bed from time to time.
he hears the echoes of silhouettes that follow me
the sound of my nightmares keep him up and about.
my feeble talks, the fragile bend of my body
surrender- surrender. – surrend-ing…
how my eyes are open when my eyelids are shut
like pasted with duct tape. I can’t move an inch
or a centimetre
can you see how my face frowns?
he cradles his neck at a distance, aches a noise
at a snail’s pace telling me that his haunting
presence is as persistent as my sleep paralysis.
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