number I and number II

reading your own history can be unsettling.
frog sound– like a sturdy arrow springing from it’s bow
the silence here is engulfing
eradicating-unsettling
it comes with the immaculate darkness and flings itself over the place like net
to trap those souls wanting lucid flight or tryst.
It captures all the mysteriousness of night, leaves things safe and dull.
The night still opens for me, rich plum, wine coloured, archaic mistress,
capable assassin, now it opens more like a wound than a door,
more like a sore oozing
a thing unable to heal,
split, warm with infection,
i might never have seen this wound for what it was had i not been free
to twist the sapphire knobs of a door so great and lovely (like the monstrous ones at the Forbidden City.)
Once i was so powerful, i commanded the violet clouds
i was the most popular consort of the languorous and the voluptuous things of night
Now, my mythology yellows under the safe, singular shellac of time
words once ripe, with potency,
now leap from the tongue with an impotent grandiose motion
ASHES
DUST
the future is curling up and i am stuck inside of the yellowing pages
RESIN
AMBER
The leaves fragrant and crisp
once eager to whisper to me have been slaughtered
the pocks in the road have been filled
the night here wickedly cruelly open and not mine
they speak of death where once i heard nurturing words

Where can i recover what has been lost?
you held a child captive.
you lied through h those hollow snake teeth.
i jumped through hoops blazing with fire
i waited

II.
understand, i am your doppleganger
i tread differently, but i follow the path you shaved
you hold me down
pounding-pressing, still
13 silver nails into each arm
tarnished things
i look at the ceiling, other nails
with less essential purpose, surrender
nails made of plainer stuff
push through the facade
and tremble down, i push too.
i am lying again in the low-cut grasses of memory
plain sparrows sing orchestral themes.
they want to keep me here
down. still.
but i am ceaseless
i pound, like an ocean
i push like an earthworm
a covetous serpent,
your desire’s child
unpleasant daughter.