Phoenix fallen

Fire up a match. Share a cigarette and let me see the ghosts in your words. Did you ever think the fight would end here? That we would be caught feeding flax seed to the extinction of doves while drums cry hawk over the bones of skeletal cities? Fall on foot, foot on fall. I fold, nicotine in your anger. Will you take me, break me, make me in the furnace one last time?

And our breath, torn in sails

Across the plains

Of America

Fire up a match. Drag your smoke in hand holding patterns of exile. Once I cut a silver tally with the blades of pencil sharpeners and chose who would bleed my wounds. So the phoenix becomes the flames. For a while. But it’s always easier to burn bright than to blow out the match. And we who are raised in the ashes of what it was to be free, well we’re just having fun.

©2017 Jac Forsyth

Image: weheartit.com

The scent of roses

Pin me to the sun, I begged you once. And you took me to your sky. You showed me eternity burning, blown autumn with the cinders of perdition.

In the hours when you sleep, I lie awake. The loss of you still wrapped around me in blankets. I am scattered, the edges of my mind blurred and rubbed out. The parade of me called off. Switched off. Temper the sound of my breath. My heart beat. I dream of ghosts, fevered and recycled demons, clawing Marley at my door. Flicking channels, I seek out my own fear in cinematic nightmares. Another autopsy of death drawn scarlet on snow. Another scream of innocence, muted down to 4am. I am cold. Disenchanted by the mechanics of terror. I hold a spyglass to catch the light of dead stars, but that smoke in soft curls still burns. When you sleep. Sometimes, I miss your silence more than your words.

And all that is left of me is the scent of roses, on your skin.

 

 

Here there be dragons

Your skin washed in shadows, I watch your breath. Your body warm with my dreaming. The scent of you laid out across this unmade land. I taste you in my blood and I am bound crimson with the ribbons of this uncharted. This place of dragons, where I watch your lips trace the outline I have torn apart in my fury. And we are found, lost, broken on the riptide of that familiar storm. I have sold the compass of my mind. Watched you floundered on the reef of corporal bones. Sworn oath to the dread sands. Taken harbour where you would cut us adrift. My hands tied to the mast of another haunted galleon. You murmur words I cannot feel. You map out ragged coastlines, oil on canvas. You fly bright with the standards of this new land. You breathe. I watch your breath. And draw my world in pencil.