letters in an empty room (part 3)
🕑 Added 2024-12-01 02:47:38 +0000 UTCSweet Cyanne,
I am certain I am being haunted.
Could it be your spectral soul in there,
Looking back at me as I at you?
By now the servants have stopped knocking.
My most frequent suitors are the tiny fellow artists,
Who's gossamer creations adorn the corners of my room.
I cannot bring myself to oust them,
Cordial houseguests that they are,
Whose most egregious crime is
Silence
In response to all my rambling,
Answering no differently than you.
And yet my heart is ill at ease.
My dreams are growing fiercer,
Sharper, shearing teeth.
And no quieter's the creature
Who conspires nightly to evade her tether.
I confess there are occasions where she's broken
Through my rotting stockades to invade your endless rest.
I scramble to contain her, but never can before she
Showers you in slobber
Shed and sweat stains,
And a thousand other sins she rations out as romance
In her mangled, starving mind.
It is perhaps an irony
That even fleshless, your whole presence is
To dangle meat before a ravished carnivore.
I cannot say I suffer any less than her.
I yearn to feel your warmth once more,
To hold your hand in mine,
And to have the myriad rehearsals of our conversations
Rebutted,
Long-refined scripts at last upturned
When the you before me would recite
A different line than I had planned for.
Now there was only that miserable understudy,
Who could not so much as speak a single sentence to your name
Without dropping disbelief into a thousand shattered fragments on the floor.
And therein is the haunting.
Is it true to your memory I imagine,
Or mine,
Wherein the margin of those pages is
Ever muddied in by inks
Of what I wish were true and what
Violent seastorms I cast against
The shores of my self-image.
The shadow that I see at night is this:
On the morning that you left me
For the marvel of the marbled world,
What knot was laced around your head?
Was it around and over, through and under,
Around, under, through and over,
Or some other obscure combination
Which my girlish mind eclipsed?
Or was it
Bow-tied
Peeking pretty
Over the corners of your perfect head?
