I baptised her face with wallpaper to quench her sorrow.
And I didn’t know whether her silence was worse than her
Wailing voice, the stammering sounds, the endlessness of her
Agony and loneliness that she drowned my bones in.
I imagined her tongue, her strongest muscle attached to
The devastated heart, that beats elsewhere, in her head,
The marshlands of epileptic moths. I looked at the crumbled
Yellow fingertips that I could still smell, a cascade of non-existent love.
From her embrace I try to evanesce into the rectum of the darkest of
Rooms. I pick my own head up from the chopping block and that’s
How she must have felt. Caressing my hair, touching my skin.
Withholding me within her, letting me go, the bloodbath, the muscle memory.
The organs that create, the lives that decay, I try to put more
Weight into my steps and burn all the money in the world.
I stare at centuries of faces in the mirror giving birth to my own.
And I feel drawn towards her beyond the gilded frame.
“La Meditazione” by Francesco Hayez (1791-1882)
Croque-Melpomene 