Untitled by Isabelle Cross

I am out of rhymes, I am out

Of poetic language, do not ask me to spin

Another gossamer-silver line from my tongue.

It’s all smoke now, curling from my nostrils

Like ribbons, like the threads of gold

I used to lace between my lips.

Those are all tangled now, coiled in my gut like a hideous snake;

Once they shone bright as the Sun,

It’s the Sun that’s caught in my breast now,

Shining too bright for comfort; I am caught in one of its rays,

The eternity of that boastful light

A scorch upon my skin,

A blaze too bright to bear,

A withered word

Too weary to raise itself into language anymore.

Brown and mouldering, it tumbles from my destitute arms

And when I look down,

It disintegrates at my feet.

It’s that gaze now which haunts me,

The one shooting from my own cracked skull;

I have let the Sun break from my breast,

Let this beast crawl from my chest;

It takes my hands, it takes the frayed strings of my heart

And strangles all that’s left

Inside of me.

So ask me no more, ask me no more

To spin such tales as I once did;

They have all been trapped in my mangled heart’s remains,

Suspended from its broken strings,

And now they hang empty and blue-lipped.

They have been murdered,

By the raging Sun,

That knows no bounds and explodes indiscriminately out of me;

It is He who’s killed my words, taken my language

And buried it in the ground in front of me.

It’s a grave I hoped to supplant, but

Before my eyes, my arms are growing thin;

And on my tongue, I find there is a word, just one—

That inlaid upon my tomb.