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

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

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