Kintsugi
Kintsugi.
I agonize some losses more than others. Because of this I ponder for what purpose loving is (at all) if, in the end, that which love creates must also be destroyed by it.’
Truly. To be empty—to remain in pieces, should seem a mercy in contrast. But as I am now, it has forged me.
Kintsugi.
Life reveals, that for every great loss that breaks, so does it gather back—lancing fragments together with the dearest experiences. It has increased my capacity for love, and so the suffering to contain it.
They are parts equal as they are everlasting. Beautiful companions are loss and love: deconstruction, renewal.
J.M.Liles ©️2024
[For Frank]
The Pale Empress
The pale empress
Scatters crimson egg stars
Against a rippled mirror moon
And weaves nightshade loom
Darker than her bruised blue mood
Across the seductive divide
How the stake hearted harpy
Won’t stay lanced to disintegrating ground
Her pin pricked fingertips
Seeding blood orange droplets
That paint such beautiful violence
Behind heaven’s sunset flooded eyes
And her widowed grace
Robed in ghosts
Eats bitter bathed stars
Plucked from hell slanted vortexes
Devouring God’s winking capsules
To black hearted nothingness
And morbid hunger
Spills beyond swallowed snow globe kingdoms
Her targeting dark charms
Set upon souls unaware
As she hatches the stone blind beast
Screaming a night’s siren call
Gripping Eden with phantom reverie
And how we tumble to crushed ruin
Towards oblivion’s razored well
Her acid smile
A massacring masquerade
As death’s blushing ruby pout
On inked cyanide lips
Drains our entire world away
Her palette ripe with purloined colour
This farewell kiss
Such blister skinned sadness
Perfuming her rosehip tragedies
Through a wounded and dying universe.
Under A Chandelier Of Stars
He inherited chaos through no fault of his own
And the saddled burden bore invisible holes
Into his hatchet hewed heart and weeping willow bowed bones
Where the noise and light would spill out ugly tales
Yet nobody cared enough to follow its telling trails
Except the old man who had survived two unholy wars
And hearsed his napalm scars beneath a splattered canvas of tattoos
Yes, this old man with his blank bullet stare
Gunpowder tongue roasting smoked conversations in the flue of his head
And choking back blurred visions of deadly exits from Khe Sanh
With ashy palms hung down like burnt offerings
Decided that to die a feral coward was unbecoming
So he hobbled his good leg over to the young man
Whose split carmine wrists were laid crucifixion like at the throat of the bridge
And began to sing a childhood lullaby that juddered out his sandpaper mouth
Each cautious note loosed through razorblade wind
Then glued to the trembling belly of night
And the young man who was ready to dance with Mr. Death
Turned back once and fell upon God’s sword of tears in a crumpling heap
As the old man’s eyes burned love’s softest flame
That ate through all barriers both seen and unseen
Like a crushed velvet bird’s numb surrender and spiral
To Hands that tendered impossible care
And when we circled back over that bridge of forgotten sorrows
You could only see one hulking silhouette
Made out of two broken shadows
And with the joy of Lazarus
They shook like a chandelier of stars
As father and son decided that one had enough love
For the both of them.
Listen
Listlessly lying on the white topped bed,
Intensely focused on the slightly crooked tile on my glorified cage's ceiling.
Safely balancing on the line between boredom and survival.
Trying not to think about days back then,
Entertainment taken for granted, and
Normal was a characteristic of a person.
reading your ABCs
Being around you means learning to read again.
But instead of sounding out letters, I'm puzzling over the tilt of your head.
I'm watching the corners of your mouth.
I'm trying to understand the word scribbled in the shape of your brows.
Why is it so hard to understand the meaning behind the slope of your shoulders?
Can you explain why your laugh seems to rhyme with when you cry?
What kind of vowels are your hands making?
Are those signals in your tone platonic, phonetic, or romantic?
Please write your body language in CAPITALS, because I keep skipping over the consonants and silent E's in your gaze.
