
There are secrets within me, secrets I keep alive but quiet like moth wings fluttering around my heart for protection as they eat away at my insides. The things I would die for, lay down my inhibitions for, the desires I beg for relief from even as I fiend for the struggle to fulfill them. When I grow brave – then again maybe I’m not even brave, maybe I’m just worn down by a world that abuses itself – I look at them.
Most people won’t become writers, not because they can’t find the words. There will always be words. But because they won’t look. They won’t look within themselves for fear of descending into a place where words dissolve the breath and feelings tear the curtains down from the ceiling of their heaviest sins, jet black bedroom eyes cringing in the daylight; where emotions run like hunted nymphs, naked through a thick forest of forbidden needs.
I look at other writers, too – the true artists, the ones who slide like elegant snakes beneath your chemical skin right before their poisonous spikes dig into your bones, the ones who wet you down with lust and inject you mad with a rage you never knew you carried all this time but find suddenly scorching up your limbs. I watch the words they use until I find the ones they didn’t, those are the words that matter most. The ones they hide from you to keep for themselves.
I’ve always wanted more. So often I can sense when people are holding their most useful, gutting stuff back. It’s the way watching a heavy storm rolling in makes me want to undress. It’s in my nature, something primordial lives in me and reaches out to find itself in others but there’s nothing there to clutch. People are gone. There’s a pressure rising in the air between their two faces and I just want to be there when the heavens finally break.
Feeling the mounting crush of the hoards of people who have nothing to say, a comforting sadness walks alongside me like a shadow, rising in the snow on the moon orbiting my cosmic thoughts. Wherever it is we come from, whatever it is we think we’re made of, part of us will always be lost.
Even after all this time I still think of you and the way we never understood each other. I didn’t want to tell you that I didn’t want to understand you. I wanted to maul you to pieces and take only your most infuriating bits with me. We fall in love like savages and paint our nails like a strip tease. We fall on our knees for the beautiful pain and the thrill of a few fingers in a gaping mouth, blood pulsing against blood. I could reach inside your chest even now, lace my fingers and pull my own heart out from your body.
I’ve done it before and you’d always thank me with those kisses at the end of your most punishing, adoring letters. I can do it again just as sure as I’m doing it now. Everything we’ve ever done, dust to cradle to grave to resurrection, is written down and hanging in the gaps between every moment you occupy with the things you know don’t matter as much as love once did.
I wish I didn’t still crave your cigarettes. But I guess in places beyond the years we spend hiding, we all still crave what we’re told we shouldn’t. Smoke and mirrors, flesh of my flesh, bone of thy bone, reflections of the same side of silence.
On the street, every person is a distant galaxy hurling itself backwards and dead bird feathers continue dripping in the rain. In daydreams, I touch you with everything I have as broken wings fall around us everywhere.
And no one writes anything anymore.
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~ Allison Marie Conway ~
My book of poetry, Vein, is now available on Amazon here.
Signed copies are available in my Etsy shop AllisonMariePoetry here.
All my deepest love and mad affection. x