Flames that Erase
Free Verse — It’s Complicated: Lit Up & TWC Contest
Letting go when my fingernails long to stay
In their eight crescent moon cocoon palm —
Prints pressed into my
Scandinavian clay.
Masochistic-me, addicted to the pain —
In that torture is bliss; buried in the past,
Next to you I lay,
Slow decay.
Again I resume the exhume, sightless
Night while we sunbathe.
The light bleaches white our skeletal daze.
Metacarpals clinging to the frayed
String theory of a dirge only memory can
Play.
Forever stagnates with each passing day.
I am the ghosts that I blame
For perpetually haunting me, insisting
Things remain
The same.
Letting go when I know I have the strength
To bear your weight,
Hanging off the edge of the cliff of our
Mistakes.
But if I hold on, then I’ve carved my stars
Crossing the “T” of fate.
So I choose to let go, live, speaking our
Epitaph into the flames that remember
Yet erase.
