I. THE ELEMENTS All of the graves I’ve dug myself out of, All I have coughed up from deluged lungs, All of the fevered fogs I have evaporated into, All of the infernos that have charred my heart, What elemental death; What encircled destruction. Heavenly abysses, Burgeoning atrophy, Crucified to a perpetual impasse, Of empty suffering, Of barbed voids, Vulture touches, silvery and cruel, Distant, yet captured still By their fateful claws of doom. II. XI I’ve swallowed all of your pain, drunken, sick with it. Gashes as abysses, streams of poppies down my faint limbs Tangled adhesions, gulps of empty hopes Half-way out of every door, every tomorrow, every reeling Now. Veiled tragedy, am I much of a bride? Descending the heavy clouded slants, in bruised sight, in light stride; The pearl is hidden, among my hazes and thorns. III. VORTEXES You hold my hair, while my odium is hurled Kneeling, with my sails furled Never to be filled with air again, never gliding but inwards and towards hiding. At the rudder the Captain’s asleep The anchor is in Neptunes keep Sirens approaching with marche funèbre lullabies, Waves taking the form of nightly alibis, And the bile clouds descending to join, This very special flipping of a coin, Heads for sinking into the naval gape, Tails for a more tempestuous escape The albatross as a judge, Of which way to nudge, The floating wreck, the breathing sunken, Devoured by the storm or by the sea drunken? And back—to my porcelain bowl, Emptying myself of rust, dust and coal. Wearing nothing but your generous gifts, A veil of chemical mists, A necklace of bruised jaundice and lilac; Your last intrusions still blossoming as roses in my back, Your honeyed amber stuck to my skin, And your rot is waltzing within.
Vera is a Scandinavian writer and philosophy graduate from Sweden, with a great interest in language, the Arts and all things hidden.
Litehouse 