We sit gilded in the heart of a cosmic prelude.

Cremated tongues lick our dark.

Our faces shimmer ephemeral,

dimming and stammering through

incantations we trusted would save us

from that dreaded fissure

like our haloed bond that failed

to keep us from those brittle ashes

sullying the dark and dusting

our bodies as you cradle me.

 

You think of me as shrine

yet men of guard force white into my jaws

once they know

I share faces with

the selfsame.

They gunnysack my limbs and clutch their hearts,

waiting on god words that boom like gong chimes.

 

They take my neck shaft,

split it back and blossom

the spoiled fruit of a bright disfigured mind,

a body depraved and bloodstained,

weary from simple prayers

and ruby brood fire-burned at its root.

 

Mother,

did your rhapsodic tongue sing sweetly

when such pressure made me dip below seafoam,

choking the swirling throat?

 

Or did you anticipate the chasm-making?

I told you

this world is an irascible beast

and my body is a carbon bit of two-fold—

a dulcet dream

or a nightmare of suffering,

some shadowy figment only you recognize.

 

Count it naught but bear the witnesses;

there are two:

in that space where you squat and make generations,

we both tried

to exist and brace one another,

only to find

we are loosed lingering celestial filament

sun-eaten and gapped by corrosive metals

trapped in the spinning centrifugal cauldron core.