Alone is an animal, hunting and slaughtered for meat.

Alone is a criminal, thieving and caught by knives at the throat.

Alone is a deity, breathing and death for five thousand years rising up through your rib cage, staring back at you in the mirror, speaking with newborn tongues.

Alone is poetry eating itself, becoming itself, words created and starved on the disrupted exposure of human bodies in full orgasm.

The words don’t need anything you don’t have but they won’t commune, they will not burn you, they will not pray for you, they will not bear succulent fruit for less than their worth.

Present yourself, bow into them, swim out to them beaten and blind and they will hold you like the fearless hands of God.

She will bow beneath you, reach inside your blood and offer you back to yourself.

Alone is worship at the bottom of every violent river only to recognize the fear as the maddening feel of wet caves dripping inside your mind; it is nights under a moonless sky begging forgiveness, begging entrance, begging release.

Alone is waking at the swell of dawn in the quiet rain, touching yourself with the ghost hands of another who knew you once more intimately than you now know yourself, and waits like a lion in sharp blades of tall grass for your return.

Alone is sacrament, alone is masochist, alone is ritual, alone is feet on the floorboards walking through seven painted doors down a vacant hall.

Alone is handcuffs and liberation, broken pianos playing themselves in the dark.

~ Allison Marie Conway ~

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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