Porticus Augustae

You ask, incredulous,

as if it's absurd

that I could now be worthy of your deceit;

as if it isn't absurd

But they protected us like walls

They broke down those walls

and our blindness visited us

with grabbing hands and open mouths

We bled and fled

We who survived cried in the shadow of ignorance

stretching from a century's dawn

We took up swords and fought

Finally, we peeled back the curse of ignorance

Beneath was a festering hundred-year-old wound

And a sea of red

They called us devils

Knocked down our walls

thereby reminding us

that devils are created, not born

Our devil is a stampede

A million placid faces

A fuming hunger

It's pitch black

A sea of darkness like ink

Even the air has skin

I'm breathing it in

Inhaling ribbons of it

The clod stuffs my lungs

A rag wedged in a crevice

My soul unravels like a drop of ink in water

I cannot think

I cannot see

I live on like a zombie

I'm waiting to die

Rehearsing with a finger pointing at the center of my forehead

Right here, right here, don't miss

Her presence brightens everything

She doesn't really know it

In her light, I am carefree

Like a child in a field of flowers

She sparkles like a gem

I’m the greedy thief

who plucked the sun from the sky

I make sure everyone knows she's mine

I put a ring on her finger

I am her daddy

I am her sturdy post

My lap is her seat

My chest is her bed

You must be regretting

And it's normally difficult to convince you,

and even more difficult this time,

to convince you that

the fault is all but mine

It was my hand on the blade

plunged into that red beating heart

which cast aside its ribcage

for a fairytale love my lips professed

I encased it in an iron maiden

and the only thing you could do

was bleed

I can't cry out from this darkness

It is what I deserve

though it's nothing next to the pain

I shouldn't expect you to come back

every time I cast you away

My words have bruised you again

I don't know what to say

The words have escaped me

I cannot use this same mouth to seek forgiveness

or ask that your light shine upon me once more

I've gnawed my nails in this sightless darkness,

minutes like hours without your light

Yet I have wounded you and wounded us

All I can do is wait till you heal

I used to see them when I was little,

blinking in the bush

on cool nights

as I walked home

from the barber's shop.

The memories are magical;

twinkling like Christmas lights.

Though I wanted to catch some,

courage was my biggest obstacle.

For some reason, as time wore on

they appeared less often

and vanished at last.

But have we stopped to reason

that there are aliens living in the ceiling

The world spun

Colours doubled

A black cavity opened in space

A thousand lights inside it like eyes staring

It swallowed me like a hungry mouth

And the world of colors closed off behind me

into the world of introspection

loud voices shearing my skull

Past and present mixing

Simmering, seething, bubbling

Thought became a soup

Fragments of here, there, everywhere and when

Sprinkled like vegetable choppings

That soup emptied out into that cavity

Settled like wet paint, becoming something new

And after a series of shifting and correcting,

Snapped into shape like paint drying on a canvas

a linear hallway spanning eternity

Countless doors arranged on either side

A marvel that all that spaced had been compressed

But it had not been really

It was just made comprehensible

An order in that cause

Each step reverberated from somewhere deep

and endless

Each breath made the walls sigh

As if ghosts had been hidden in the door cracks

I walked down them in awe and the deeper I went

The longer my shadows stretched

Until it thinned to the width of a bacteria

And then one of the doors flung open

Inside it lay darkness

Light from a TV barely making out the furniture and accessories

This place, this time

Was when everything started losing shape

An eclipse that could last a lifetime

A self-concocted nightmare;

the sun receded from the sky

towing the colours of this world

and its atmospheric canvas.

The air grew inert

my efforts to breathe proved futile.

The nightmare lasted an hour for every second

Stranded on an endless desert

sands whipped like switches

I could neither breathe nor see

They don't want to

They pin badges on their chest

to hide cold hearts,

they are all visuals

like rapids in shallow streams

but deep within

a nagging sense of loss festers

and maggots of insecurity

devour their rotting flesh

erasing the sliver of humanity