His motives
weren't important,
the eye does not blink,
the flesh and the mind do.
Truth is too heavy to bare.
The after-taste of joy
is bitter, the sense
of velvet or cotton
are dreams
he can't quite remember,
forget, and the sound
of its stirring
in the room next to his,
the shapes of bodies
discarded in beds
on a soft afternoon,
in an all but empty house
build frames from the silence
and horror from the frames.
His hands drawn
by the shadows
of flame,
watching candles bow
in conspiring whispers,
there is nothing inside
but the vision of others,
the margins of weakness
in the comrades of love
and the losers of life,
there is no sunset kiss,
no pandemonium in the fringes
of that murmuring heart,
there is no flower smiling
in its glass coffin,
no weathered words,
no helpless words,
nothing desperate,
nothing sacred.
The halls were always long,
the swords were wrought
as cold as moonlight,
the quiet he kept
was his only secret.
Lips on the forehead,
the magic of disaster,
the music of a man
unbecoming, tasting
the pain, the shade
of blood, the scars
he left, his unscathed
skin, his dry eyes,
unblinking, unknowing,
knowing his secrets,
knowing his silence,
he washed his hands
clean,
in storms like screams
from her coiled throat
in that man's coiled hands
in the dark in the cotton
and the velvet
and the fire and its shade
he did not flinch
for he did not suffer
for he had never known
what he could not know
in the apples flesh,
in the lightning's white,
in the scent of a letter,
in the terror of love,
in another's hands,
another's eyes,
another's life.
Another life.