Joséphine at Midnight

Time has come to let you drip off.

What constitutes your matter, it hits the floor.

I set it afire, the inflammatory you.

You linger around the tightness of my chest. My immobility.

 

Your hands pressuring my shoulders.

The sounds evading your mouth, a requiem of my own voice.

I rid my body of you.

I rid it all. Desert it. Its right of existence: lost.

 

Hammer the carpet. The cheeks. The ears.

A whisper. A death. Your hands.

You swallow; on my tongue: poison.

Joséphine, he is a lover of veils, not of your eyes.

 

You stumble when he walks beside you.

You don’t recognise yourself, sound false, sound like your own worst enemy.

Everybody looks at you, asking themselves: why?

What they don’t know is that you’re asking yourself deep inside.

 

She is lying on her bed, her tears rolling sideways, falling off the cliff of her face.

Her breathing self-compromised.

Thinking about him.

The smotherer. But, where did she go?

 

She holds her own feet, disaster has struck.

She has become a woman.

The incubus pestering her heart.

Worming its way in with a love

That tastes like abandonment and smells like decay.

“Dark-haired Beauty in a White Veil” by Adolfo Müller-Ury (1862-1947)