Trigger Warning

1 – her childhood

Deep diving in malice
they burn an isolated ibis.
Wallowing in malice
they worship their own poison,
as scattered egrets lament losing
sweet breath in sunlit puddles.

They smother the underbrush
of summer with snowfields
that freeze an innocent girl
from the surprise of being adrift and tiny
in vast veins of space,
crammed with the taste of motion,
variety of living fables, raw senses.

A Muse exposes her cracks and
catastrophic time signature.
Her hard, withdrawn guitar
strums each day under an improvised voice.
She grabs at joyful moonlight; but misses
when whispering impulse imprints
its own eroding rhythm,
mixing Crystal with her bleeding core.

2 – her adulthood

She shuffles to her own deathwatch
in a park roughing up
unclear memories near
a long boulevard of derelict row houses.
Assaulted eyes watch wars, rapes, attacks,
theft, and beatings through doorways and rain.
Neighbourhood loiterers scatter at pealing gunshots.

A million hands – beneath mown grass
seeping blood along her park lanes
littered with careless shells –
grip death by a thousand rigid roads.
Her gaping face dissolves despondent
rumination in a windowpane.

To get where she is you have to go through hell
in a landscape of unlit bedrooms
as China White
seeps through gravestone bones.
A hollow street code ruins her innate refrains
through masks of cruel compliance.

Some that seek their place find a void instead:
The darkest scene,
without history or luminous nerves,
sustains her cracking dreams on moist lawns;
while dirty needle tracks
presage a truncated farewell
draining her lost imagination.

Her hands shape the pulse of
blood beneath skin, her breath
murmuring anguish through an open temple
where she prays by a dry hedge.
She stumbles through turgid lines,
a neophyte beneath the moon’s indifference.

3 – Eulogy for Astraea

Dusk adorns her with a necklace of mirrors.
No one doubts the beauty of granite, polished;
marble, carved into sinewy columns;
or her face of a dozen reflections,
and starlight crossing bridges of black crystal
to sing a dirge for her dead natural voice.

Patience is a breeze that waits in branches
with pure unmasked wisdom.
Their rigid ignorance can’t find her:
She’s lost in a dream of double-headed herons.
Alone but not lonely,
ruined and rebuilt with crystals that horde the sky,
she leaves traces and signs of her being.

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