….
Laid low, laid out like soulmates never meant to meet
in this life, in the spectrum of folly and limitation.
A painting layered, re-mastered, re-mused and then,
burned by neglect.
Miniature moment of perfection, condensed
to hold a legacy in swirling matter, hard and glittering.
Fractures as long as a walkway
stretching the borders of a great body of water.
Stringing thoughts like a child’s dream. I know,
but I’ve learned not to take synchronicity so seriously,
learned there is only choice, and chance caved into,
selected to stand as fate – the end result, resulting
in a theory of complexities and open systems.
Stuck in the ground, protruding stilted like a statute.
Tell me it is true, that nothing pure is subjected to disease.
Crickets in the late morning.
When I am fixated, it is fantasy, false as poison in soup.
When I am lucid, liquid budding, my fingers are flames,
and all that they contact pulse with their heat.
Various clouds like currents perpetually pumping –
financial lack, and I, myself, curled up on the bottom stair.
Beds I defend, determined to lay in, over and over
hurting for considered crimes. Erasing perimeters, I clutch
at fraudulent mercies, securities of working furnaces
and washed hair. How to love damaged flesh, radiate love
for what is broken, far beyond romanticism, dangerous
as a cockroach and forever mutating –
translucent shells and pores – radioactive
and growing more grotesque under slabs of rotten wood?
Love, I do not understand you as I am older
and keeping up the climb. Medications and
broken down dishwashers.
Debt like ghosts that stick to my aura, smothering out the colour –
Oh weedy garden! Sparrow on my roof, talk to me for a while.
How can I love, middle-aged, half over, clear
of a younger person’s hope and indecision?
Pointing at ecstasy (a snail on my forehead) pointing,
pointing, stung.
Copyright © by Allison Grayhurst 2014
amazon.com/author/allisongrayhurst
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First published in “The Muse – An International Journal of Poetry” Volume 4, Number 1, June Issue 2014
http://themuse.webs.com/June%202014/muse%20june%2014.pdf
http://themuse.webs.com/latestissues.htm
Published in “Art Villa” December 2015
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