The Valium Bride

i
you are the mangled alarm clock inside the rubble : hours leeched to your hamstrings like a jinx of scorpions. you keep ringing with a hiccup of omens.

ii
winter is my stillborn haiku. an alembic parnassus. a casket wired to the cleft in the revolver. a new cosmos shuffling through its syllabus of bitter gravity inside the iota.

iii
someone will hold your hands with the seasoned kindness of a blind romany seamstress. someone will tell you your freckles are a fresco of unstitched copper sequins dancing on a damp floor.

iv
when you disappear from their lives, most people will remember you like an extinct language : a strange sleight of tongue; a loss wrapped in lingua obscura. a silent genocide of syntax.

v
heart like a black pentagram carved into the waist of a coral reef.

vi
my medicated arteries run helter-skelter hell tides like the london underground. in my backpack a clandestine stockpile of psychosis pills; a burgled kaleidoscope of kites. intente volar : untranslated skies.

vii
a sunday in may you penciled a wanderlust inside the alcove of your arm as though the calendar of your childhood was an atlas of the spice road. you touched the rain with fingers camouflaged in the crushed turmeric of the indian sun. thereafter, all the purgatories cinched to your heels smell like burned cinnamon and revolving doors.

vii
the world is an impacted third molar in need of extraction. you are a small globule of novocain.

viii
the drugs raised you to the status of the lankiest eucalyptus. an army of beetles marched the first koan on your atrophied husk. you fell like the thinnest strand of lightning.

ix
some homes are like the brief pain of papercuts.

x
show me whom you haunt and i will show you how you many times you will need to die.

- Scherezade Siobhan (from Whale Road Review)

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