perhaps a decade from now, my mirror will have healed enough to find a place for me in its viscera. standing before it, i will recall my first date with dissociation, when i slipped on the sandalwood-carved baby skin i had found dangling on the branches of the ganges delta.
it instantly coiled around my waist and revolved onto itself with the suppressed echo of a music box dancer (shackled by ghungroos instead of pointe shoes) and taught my audaciously graceful hands how to rip out the tandava from the chest of a nutcracker. but i was a tree whose branches had fled far from its roots, and over time my ribs dissolved in the melanin they had been steeped in, so i bathed in cynical acids to strip the tarnished bark away. it remained obstinate, singing severance through my nerves like shiva's astral comb and chafing against my milkweed bones which leaked hushed thunder in streams of turmeric-stained milk.
You found all this very disappointing (perhaps i was another failed experiment for You). "what's a god to a nonbeliever?" You whined, and as retribution for Your grievances, You plucked all my eyelashes and yanked my nose to one side to make room for one more mole while i wept jasmine petals and You prayed that i would ring Your temple bells
YOU ARE READING
CYANIDE DREAMER
Poetrysaturn rises from the valley of my neck and sets in the folds of my hell-drunken veins [ #1 in poetry, 1.25.19 ]
