Rosary0fSighs

His mind kneels, heart dancing his mind is dark and he tastes his heart. Persimmon sweetness, its faint undertones turning to something unknown. Restless nights greet unhappy dawns a fever crept underneath his pillow and made its home. Something moves into his spirit from above, disturbs the rush of his blood. A flood of words weighs his tongue down down So many stones in his feet, filling his bones his mind is drowned

Waves of thunder collide inside our lungs nurses hold canisters of pills to light delicate between finger and thumb, jewelers appraising pearls. A hard shake held up beside the nape, with baited hush assess how many days we’ll be imprisoned here. Shells pressed against walls with ears - strain for the sound of the sea, salt air, the rush of freedom it takes blood to hear. We pull hooks from our bodies, cast them back to the dark like mermaid scales and purses. Sea debris haloes our feet carapace of drowned souls, scattered drift wood crosses, lost possibilities. We see white cascade into a cup like so many stars thrown across the night. Petals and ashes on a grave of water teeth shaken out of our skulls, crabs scuttling to escape crab pots. Our hands quake as we stretch them out, naked pain. Lightning strikes in pulses that tattoo lines across our skin. We are sailors weathered from red storms, waged within. White fire licks our feet, ebbs and creeps back like foam.

Loneliness basks in the hammock of our collarbones we harbor longing, slumbering beneath a thicket of secrets and scars. My hands ache to trace the shape of your body’s fingerprint left in a mattress after you get up. Your eyes follow my shadow as it disappears around the corner with a farewell. We circle one another saying little truths as tension builds. We push against the crescendo like a bruise, bite our lips, refusing to break first. You rehearse lines in your mind - conversations and endings unwritten. We forbid and trespass our own promises again and again. I starve my own heart - a slow drowning in the pool of your voice. You reverberate in the chamber of my lungs, pearls of air like comets. I burn through your chest, melt against your lips, molten blue and curled in sleepy blankets. You collect our laughter in pockets to keep like a lullaby from a music box. We both sleep troubled - restless, turning, tangling. In the dark, my hands search for yours.

I listen for the hush of footfalls in the corridor each restless creep postmarks grief through walls of red brick and mortar. Slow drip of water torture in my skull, lullabies in rocking tick beating twin-step with the flicker of marching clock feet - light drags its weary limbs to afternoon. Soon it will be the hour to follow silhouettes from this room, buckle myself in and wait out the storm. I shelter in shadow spells, pain cast over my skin fingernails biting into palms as though buried - alive and clawing freedom from a darkened tomb

I am my own architect I take my bones build castle walls scraping the sky with fingers of stone. Cut a skylight in my heart, and it beats a rhythm a rhythm arrhythmic beats in the dark, all its own. I ache to lie down in the quiet earth green blanket gown out of leaves and dirt - any place to drown out sounds that feel like the rain of guns pelting hail and thunder, that shut out the sun. Volcanic words, fists and magma fire, clouds of blood and bruises igniting in a storm that breaks and breaks forever. The ground calls so loud "you belong to me", and we belong together. We are made of clay and mortar and mortality and I stack my bones. As I child I felt immortal until I died and died again, and signed my gravestone. I bled into the earth by own design and they started my heart beating red brought me back to hell- Living death is no kind of oath beside graven promises of everlasting rest. Sleeping awake in screaming violence I learned to sleepwalk through enemy lines. You become

Grey shadows loom in rows around my door a cluster of bruises, waiting for the moon to rise her slipknot circle into the rafters of the sky. They move in time, loose and heavy as a noose of hands around my throat. My breathing closes swallow, swallow hard shallow gasps as smudges tread their march spreading black into my room. I watch with nightjar eyes and hear with ghost-bat ears for footfall and door creak. Hallways baited with breath loaded as a gun and screams I cannot speak. Horror is cut into the bone skeleton of this home. In the dark my ears grow ears of their own. My antelope heart turns and runs. Daylight bleeds its fingerprints over the wall embers of relief ignite burning heartbeats and breaths through my chest with their slow growth and gentle crawl. The knifeblade under my pillow loses its weight as my hand falls. The spell breaks, and I lay my head down, down, in drowning sleep. A moment of death before voices waking with the day disturb and raise me from

My breath catches in my chest and flickers out. I howl down the corridors fluttering like the flame of a sputtering candle in the darkness. Howling smoke wreath, I reach for the crack of the windowsill. My voice aches and screams to lift the pane a perfect prism of glass separates me from home. Outside, streetlights wink so many stars and I dream of freedom. He lifts my feet onto the metal pedals it bites into the soft underside of my flesh. I steal footsteps. Cold floor, machine whirrs lyric alarm to my racing heart. Sleepy nurses snap to attention in the night, they shine their tiny laser spotlights into my eyes “Why are you awake? Get back into bed! You’re sick!” Check the tubes and IVs for tampering, crisp nods. Their pens bobbing up and down in small salutes.

My lips crack and bleed, the skin of deserts. They restrict my water and dispense ice chips measured a millimetre at a time. Heart monitor beeps with every motion butterfly effects, slow echoes pulses and waves of pain, pain, shame hollow caverns missing from their charts. They don’t see my face, they see a collection. Insect bodies stabbed through with delicate pins perfectly preserved, labelled, prized, cotton-wool stacked and exo-skeletoned. He presses the soft underside of my mandible and leaves me to my pain for days exclaiming that he’s never seen nor heard of a specimen like me. He relishes the study. The tube pulls deep into my stomach like the rope of a well or a divining wand for water. I imagine dropping stones and making wishes to fill my belly or create a sinkhole big enough to swallow me into oblivion. I wish for rain that never comes and realise they never hear my words or ask the right questions. I touch the salt of my cochineal lips ground ruby red and taste