Paint hides the cracks in the
plaster but we know they are
there, you feel them under
your brush, I see them in the
photographs where
I wander through these halls, turning
to a mirror, I see right
through myself. Where is this?
What are you trying to tell me?
I want to tell you all the secrets
that never got to touch your skin.
I want to give you all the fingerprints
that never got to hold your burdens.
I want to skim along the ghost of
your spine and kiss you every single
word that never got to reach your heart.
You are black ink on my
skin, whispered songs
in the cold veins where
once life wrote itself on the
world. I see you, I see your
words. Who are you? I remember
these hallways from
before you lived here, creaking
floorboards reminiscent of that
time, the way
this corner is lower than that corner.
I do not know you. Why
do you care?
There aren’t enough words to speak
when your life is calculated in the
folding of napkins and the scratch
of a lonely pen, the slow dance of
a steering wheel and in the swallow of
a memory best left kept in a drawer.
Have you ever wondered if your hands
would still fit around a doorknob, even
if they are the same color as the moon?
You haunt me with your questions
and I haunt you with the touch of
an ocean ready to bloom.
I am trapped in these walls,
my love, so write to me. You have
given me a taste of
memories written in the margins
of books boxed up and shipped
away, donated to hospital
wards beyond the locked
doors of my history.
Unlock the doors for me.
But I do not know you,
what, in return,
do you want from me?
With your closed eyes and phantom
caress, I ask you to plague me, to
wake me, to wander beside me in the
shadows until my very last breath is
just as hollow as your candle wax bones.
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Collaboration between shesanargonaut and submarinedreams
