Chew it up – chew it all up;

Says one shadow to the other –

The shadows cast on my cerebral cortex

From the gyri and sulci of my brain.

One shadow slides down a sulcus

While a splinter of light

Sits majestically atop each gyrus.

The combination of light and shadow

On these curves and enfoldings

Has formed a painting,

Which is reflected behind my eye lids.

Won’t they see?

Won’t they hold a candle up to my eyes

And shoo the demons away

So the image becomes clearer?

For how devouringly they feast

On my gyri and sulci.

If it weren’t but for God’s voice,

A voice I played on my broken record machine –

They could never notice the lines on my hands;

Isn’t that the way of His angels? I heard one say.

So if His voice was eaten up by the cries of my devil.

My devil who I had buried in inked pages

And notes of symphonies of the night –

All my lost things would come back to me.

But they have gone,

And His voice licks the image of my gyri

And sulci reflected so behind my eye lids.

Won’t you sing with me father, before

You take up to pirating in the sea of mother’s blood?

Even when the razors slipped across my skin,

And the water rose in my ears – you chose to gulp

Your glasses of grey misdirected agonies.

I asked mother to pull back the chord of oestrogen,

So I could climb back.

Look me in the eyes she did, and poofed

Into the mist I was born into.

A loud dream; so very loud to wake up from.

I’ll be done with the food of my chaos,

Won’t you see the image even then?

Their lies will be the poison in your children

And their money will be the flowers

On your grave.

So I choose the life of a wildflower…

A wallflower.

The sky melts at my doorstep each time

I see you – you with the grave mud sticking

Out from your ears and nostrils.

Can I have my ten pounds of sadness now? You asked.

But I choose the truth and for ten seconds spent

Burying you in these flailing loving arms,

From my gyri and sulci, the image still on them,

Ten pounds I cut out from them

And place atop your hands in return.

They fit, like the truth found a home.

Walking out the door with ten pounds of a truth instead of sadness,

You will never look back.

They will never let us remember,

So we shall never stop to forget.

He went on – whom I never saw again.

But those ten pounds of my truth,

In his hand lines they grew roots.

With each hand line sprouting, the truth

Sprouted too, blooming in black and charcoal mystery.

As each hand multiplied to a billion

Over the years – the children of truth increased…

All with the flicker of ten pounds.

Now the image – you never bothered looking at –

The same image is what’s reflected

In each of those hand lines, for

My eye lids reflect the eyes of end of Time now,

Not the image, the image with shadow and light

Resting atop the gyri and sulci.

Forget me? The water took me

Long before their waves of control did.

Build a house, the lady in red will

Never be invited down here in this house.

Her parlor tricks and ashen lies were

The knife I used to cut those ten pounds

Of truth from my cortex –

All this devotion is my stars;

Every heartbeat I chase, the air they suffocate in.

He let me go, the father I buried in my attic

And the mother chewed me up, the one whose hatred

I choked on, just to live some more.

Did you not see?

Did they ever see?

Their eye lids reflect insidious.

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