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Enchantress
You arrive like the first word
of a language I didn't know
I was born to speak—
slender as the space between
breath and prayer,
a rose opening in the dark
of my closed mouth.
That glance of yours
cuts through me clean,
the way morning light
splits an empty room in half:
before you, after you.
How do I unknow the weight
of your absence?
How do I unlearn the way
my ribs crack open
when someone speaks your name?
*
I follow your scent
through morning streets,
a pilgrim drunk on the possibility
of glimpsing your face—
my spring incarnate,
the season I carry
in my chest like wildfire.
Your laughter tastes like copper pennies
on my tongue.
Your touch scorches
the frost off January's skin.
*
In my dreams, I am the storm
your thoughts ignite.
I would pour my life
like gasoline into the engine
of your smallest need.
Even faithless, even distant,
you grow orchids
in the cemetery of my wanting.
*
Where do I run when fate
has carved my name
into the bark of inevitability?
Who do I fight but the mirror
that shows me my own starvation?
Bartender, pour the drink
that tastes like forgetting.
Musician, play the song
that sounds like dying
beautifully.
*
God, send me someone
who speaks fluent
heartbreak,
who can excise the bruised echo
of what never fully was.
From one look—just one—
I could sculpt a universe
small enough to drown in.
*
This heart bleeds your cruelty
through every pore.
My eyes telegraph morse code
to anyone willing to listen:
S.O.S. — again, again, again.
Patience hemorrhages.
The infrastructure of hope
buckles under its own weight.
*
If you came to my bedside now,
you'd find only the hollow
where hunger carved out my name—
this grief-scraped shell
that has declared war
on every sunrise
that doesn't taste like you.
But I keep breathing anyway,
this stubborn machine of longing,
this fool who mistakes
survival for victory.
Copyright ©
Saeed Koushan
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