Featured image: Desecrated Shrine by Vardges Sureniants
I clutch history tight within my palms,
word by word,
letter by letter,
the walls between the words, the cracks between the letters,
while beasts, with savage jaws, are gnawing at my hands,
and blood spills like sand.
Barely wrenching from their lusting teeth,
I drag my blood-soaked fists to my lips,
and whatever is left
I gorge and swallow whole.
I know the hunger lodged deep in my ribs;
the greedy acidity of my stomach—
it will cherish this eucharist
with a tenderness the world has never offered.
As beasts tear at my core,
flesh and blood, a rotten gore,
a heap of ruin, tangled tight,
proof of pain, proof of plight.
Tears flow down the furrows of my cheeks,
burning through my pillow,
my bed,
the floor,
all the way to the earth—
and beyond.
They pierce the globe
and reach the cosmos.
With trembling hands, I clutch at history,
but my fingers only sink,
lost in the suffocating softness of my bed—
the bed that, with an angel’s tuneful patience,
carries the unbearable weight of me and my hollow gut.
This is not a poem;
thus, I chop the lines
jagged
and
raw,
so that at least I can
digest them
word by word,
letter by letter,
choking down the spaces between,
until they become the marrow of me.
