The Last Time I Beheld Beauty

you spilled
from my fingertips.

I painted
the sunrise in puddles of your faded expressions
and grew cities 
from the glimmer of smiles burning in your eyes

I could swim in the cerulean blue
of your mile-wide iris,
or drown myself in the trenches
beneath your eyelids that fill with tears whenever you cry;
mapping oceans on your face
in streams and rivers

I tripped on the acoustics of your bedroom;
the sleepy curls in your hair
did nothing but
amplify the sound of my fall
and smother me when I found the floor
with my hips,

you built the curve of my lips
from guitar strings.

the gales that blew you 
into my life whipped my hair around my face
and shivered between my ribs
making breathing hard and speaking
harder than the concrete that found my creaking bones
whenever you left me lonely enough
to rot and turn to sodden mush
for you to squish between your fingers

I don't believe that you
were ever Heavenly or that you
knew anything more than the Bible said
about yourself and others,
but your book could never explain to grieving mothers
whose child had died at birth
why the corpse in her arms was destined to burn.

Summer spun itself in circles
around my fingers
like hoops around the waist of seven year olds,
too innocent to know their own ignorance, 
I guess we've all been there, 
some of us just didn't grow up

Woe is me,
I cannot see past my own hands, which
I have firmly clamped over my eyes
so I can pretend not to notice
all the horrors I claim to believe in.

Copyright © Bree Morton-Young | Year Posted 2011

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