putrefy

when my eyes quiver open, they are clouded
with a thousand years of slumber's remnant,
and i find my hand warmly, coldly enveloped
by the melancholy embrace of your own.

as your form comes to vague focus, i am assaulted
by the harshly angelic incandescent lights,
but in your deep thalassic eyes i find gleaming
the glitter of a drop from the ocean yet unshed.

i yearn to reach to you, to extend delicately a finger
to wipe away the solemn salt of the sea,
but my hand is all but gone, a sick, cold, stiff mass,
and the dark, rotting fingers can manage only a sensitive graze to pale sheets.

when i give a glance to my form, to the body of which i have no memory,
i discover mobility to be a task not shy of monumental,
and in place of vernal skin of youth and tender touch
is stiff leather and a mangled snarl of veins and bone.

unkempt and faded is your hair, and i hurt with recognition
at the sight of a face beginning to reflect the decay of my own;
a good-natured one so starved of what once was teeming and bountiful
seems now only sunken, as there remains only a skeletal husk and a faint sorry memory.

this body’s throat makes a gurgle, and i watch with absent eyes
as for but an instant, your stoic veil slips away,
and the crystalline glimmer in your eyes
gives way to a solitary tear that leaves a river in its path.

“it’s me,” i want to say to you, “i love you,”
while for the consolation of two i hold warmly your face,
but the prickling chasm of numbness in this body renders useless my any will,
and an understanding, true utterance of comfort it translates to but a wet, garbled rattle.

the mask you held up so arduously falls away that instant,
clattering to the floor and shattering to a thousand tearful fragments;
you turn your head away, jamming your ocean eyes shut,
and with your sleeved hand you stifle a guttural cry.

this body cannot expel the scream that roars in my mind;
waves crash and foam against walls of bone,
for i know that you are not so revolted by me, love,
but by this thing that has so wickedly taken my rightful place.

when once more your eyes meet the cage of mine,
a precarious, shaking breath and a single word fall from your lips;
“no,” you utter, in a flat, trembling defiance,
and i dread with deep nausea what i know is to follow.

as you turn and walk away, an unknowable ocean is left with your footfalls,
and i can nearly feel the crack of the dam of bone
as, perhaps eons overdue,
a final whisper of a breath chills my lips.

Author Notes: i'm better now

addition 8/10/23: gah dam can't believe i wrote my prettiest poem about a bitch with a piss kink

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