Paint Chip Poetry Prompt #4

Rabbit hole memories pass through steel
A harvest of emptiness and pain
Emerald eyes belie a dark stain
emoting nothing, a blank seal

Lily of the valley, shield me
Lead me down a primrose path
Let me outside this aftermath
Laying under a Ginko tree

(ballad stanza, iambic tetrameter)

(paint chip poetry, week four)

Little ligeia, part 2

Material Things.

Us, in a bathroom.

You kicked over the bottle of whiskey and sat on the toilet.

I stood, staring into your drunken face, my bloody handprint on your right shoulder of your grey shirt.

I held myself and asked you to acknowledge what you did.

You wouldn’t.

I don’t know what happened next. We went back to bed and I laid awake, in crippling waves of agony, listening to your blacked out breathing. I kept telling you I hurt. You said nothing.

No words.

After this I kept silent as a profession. So many things have passed by since I last heard my true voice.

I’ve been faking ever since.

Faking that this didn’t happen, faking normal. Pretending to be happy and normal. I only feel safe alone now.

Little lygeia

We all have our own Lygeia, a lost love, a whole plotline gone astray. You, giver and destroyer of life. I marked days and months by that night. Nine was the hardest number.

I lost a dream. A dream of what America should be. Respect, equality, looking into the eyes of another as another part of the soul. What you gave me in turn was the knowledge of what really makes history, brutality and force. I can’t bring myself to write the reality of what happened. Just abstractions.

Searing pain, feeling helpless like a child. Suffering a mortal wound.

I survived.

I don’t know why.

Neither of us could handle a child, but it wasn’t your sole decision. I was left a living crime scene, unable to escape from the horror of what happened. I spent so much time alone, seeking peace.

The smell of burning plastic. The feeling of suddenly being lifted away. Everything breathing at once. The realization that the body and life is a part of the earth…it can be altered but never broken. Forms pass but aren’t lost.