Prelude
by Shaunna Harper
Our bed screams red,
gutted, split, under weight
of wonderings in my head;
bruised like a throat, crushed by hungry lips,
gaping like a wound, stunning.
The walls are indented
and cannot be mended,
colour of your temper in blotchy black and blue,
handprints sink between spine and sinew,
hollow concave, your untimely grave,
the art of your fingerprints in my plaster; angered,
blueprint of your bones in the mattress, jagged.
The windows breathe out
lungfuls of sighs we couldn’t let out,
sunlight’s gleaming pout
a hot, slick embrace;
groan of bedroom verses, cat-calls, cries,
in off-beat curses and rhyme, distorted face
like shattered glass, crazed.
Moistened touch leaves beauty like henna
cut into heart-line, life-line, my pores;
maps in my make-up, smeared and scorched,
curtains dance in stiff, imagined breeze,
ashtray remnants swirl like leaves.
And the floorboards won’t be still,
they think you’re here, naked, yawning,
perched on the window-sill, you wander
like a shadow from moonlight to morning,
you hang your skin on the racks
and sink into me, deflated, relaxed,
as the season for lust
becomes a season for love,
for no reason at all,
yet ‘I’ becomes ‘us’;
and pain becomes trust,
inexplicably, intrinsically,
one.
And the world we host
remembers it all,
engraved as we are at a cost.
We savour the senses the most.
Copyright ©: Shaunna Harper
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The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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