Lil Locked Heart

Mercy

God-sent, understood the roughness of wood grafted into his body; manipulated it once, finding creation fresh as the scent of earth, the source of skin moulded into dancers who themselves, creating new bodies with the silk of touching air, find the aroma of the sky lifting them off their feet. Creator enfolds himself in creation, in the pulsation of a heart hearing, sensitively, the colors of a strain painted across the space of sound. Listening to silence, we demonstrate fear in faces, pulled like rain into the depths of emotion, pattering in the comfort of divine gifts; invisible to our simplicity, they are swelling like voices of worship, like sweet smoke, the incense of prayers.

wordless

I come home and I find myself desperate to write, but there is nothing. Now I can only feel acutely how much I’ve separated my life; there’s the girl in school who is bubbly, happy, achieving, caring; then the girl who comes home, misanthropic and hungry for solitude, a book, pens and rain; and then there’s the girl who likes to think she is in love or capable of extending that love to humanity around her.

Sometimes all these girls conflate into one, when I want to be them all but can’t. So I find myself paralyzed by my own desires, turning like the infinite hands of a clock, round and round till the clogs cut into time and shatter the little frame strapped onto a wrist, limp as the poems that never could be written, that wordlessly stay on the moisture of my lips, breathed and figureless as these thoughts collapsing silent on themselves.

Inadequacy and inarticulate prayers

swollen as tears dripping
pathetically on an empty plate
steaming with the smell of indecision.

coffee letters

The coffee letter you wrote no longer smells of coffee. The ink is spread out as before, and the music notes seem a little still. Lieder ohne Worte, I’m being sentimental. I wish it still smells of coffee.

(I wish that we were still talking, that you would write me more letters, that we’d be less busy.)

Then maybe I’d be a little wiser.

Watch

He checks the broken watch and imagines the digits flickering on the black screen. Constantly. There’s pounding music in the background, and he isn’t sure if this is his mind or another inane reality. He thinks he is young, or likes to think he is young. The girl is young too. He limps forward to say hello, flicking his tongue over the gaps in his teeth as he sputters. Her smile makes him sure he is young, and he lets out a low awkward laugh like he last did at prom, which he doubts like a dream.

When he sticks his hands into his pants, he is puzzled at the way his princess walks away. Still, he lets out another low awkward laugh as she interacts with the nurses, the normal ones. He waits for her to come back, smile silly on his face, knowing she is not one of them but is his.

He couldn’t say anything more than a few broken sentences through the brokenness of his teeth. They took him far away from the girl, back into his ward. He sat on his bed, his fingers warm as he played with the sheets. He wished they had at least let him hold her hand. Now there’s nothing more to do, so he flicks the watch, black and broken, and watches the numbers again.