Wherever are they - the Beautiful Dead ones?
Where is the crossfire, the exploding bottle, the bricks falling like teeth?
Is my anatomy a bone-crushed railroad track to run over again and again?
They want to jab me with corkscrews and leave my flesh picked clean, derailed.
Body like a cold white basement filled with ghosts.
Tar snuff. Death dust. Dolmens standing tall on burial grounds. Cannonfire. Shattered bolts.
I see runestones proclaiming the names of my former selves, brief summaries of their lives etched in foreign words, in stone.
The ground is misty, murderous and sparsely scattered with wet feathers,
dead blooms,
gold crucifixion.
Needing to lean on the pole of light.
Swallow the pink meadow. Skull pearl.
Poisons incandescent and timeless beneath glass.
Needing to implode. Mouth scraped shut. Drug-damaged grey matter.
Each gem I pluck from the cityscape creates a dress of stars to wear over my disintegration.
Sparrows collect crumbs on the sidewalk. My eyelids close against their beaks.
Knowing what I know is like a plummeting, broken elevator. Rising, then crashing down
door sealed shut
out of luck
at the end of the longest timeline
beyond earth and space
and the comprehension of love.
I’m a crashed plane, a steel glint, a skyline of nations on fire.
A witch burned by a cult.
Snared in webs of wicked air, branded by a prophet.
The magnitude of my emotions is beyond human understanding.
I must kill each feeling
film strips from eyes unreeling
black pupils bleed rage
all over the stage -
excise my heart.
- “Zenith” by Darla Cathilde Cutherford
