We invited clouds to engulf our rooms.
The invasion would not end there.
The self-sacrifice and hollering martyrdom.
The obliviousness to love, the hidden death traps.
The scars and scrapes and deadening patterns and
Silent screams and wrinkles and dust on every single
Plate and mug. I hear your voice in the wardrobe.
Your evanescent scent around every sleeve, my temples.
You have embodied a home, intoxicated the walls around us.
And I betray myself, thinking that, I must run and leave and
Disappear, dive into a million different names and bodies
And swallow the memory of you in one gigantic gulp with my
Teeth. I sense your presence at the tip of my feet. Your face
And obscure body hovering in the corner of my room.
Maybe I’m taking refuge from the ghost you’ve become.
Maybe that’s what you always have been. To me, to my mind.
You’ve steered my body in monotonous directions, my legs
Became yours, my hands and arms were not my own anymore.
And I looked at you with an exchanged soul, a blemished facade
On top of a crackling self in the midst of a revolution against your
Tutorials of repetition and tradition and casual cruelties and hardships.
We hunted one another in that very house, the space that
Seems to never die and disintegrate, the place where so
Many hours have been spent, the sphere that keeps haunting
And reappearing in my distorted dreams, screaming at me
And my travelling, self-exiled limbs. And I let the dead alley explode,
I blast the roof open and shout my name through the glass splinters of
Every single window that you framed. Into the world, out of my heart.
“Vanitas – Still Life with Books and Manuscripts and a Skull” by Evert Collier (1642-1708)
Croque-Melpomene 