The inevitable “us”

 

Clouds on the turntable.

 

Saturday stumbles; the

strange terminology brews

in a quandary, looped

in our scramble of scrabble -

 

reticent rhymes, warping

the waterbed, nightstands

of red ribbon thrills, over

flowing with cracked cabernet.

 

I turn, I take five and divest

from clairvoyant conjurings

and prefabricate prophecies

 

Cumulus shroud the clear

sky, sans a semblance of

what will define us. Yet,

 

rain writes our song, irregardless.

 

Then we clean up the mess

 

In the bold font of cursive, I

scribble our names intertwined.

 

The poems pass between us

making art, taking us miles

from this world as its knife

twists with sorrow and madness.

 

We cradle each other’s deep

routed phobias, insecurities

and neurosis.

 

Best friends; we lie and we

cover another; protector

and mongrel to sick on the

daring ones, foolish enough

 

to come fuck with us.You,

my ride or die chariot. Two

on a half shell, wounded

but always restitching.

 

I’ve promised to haunt you

should you try to get free from

me and vice to the versa, you

have confessed to me.

 

We have a weird, weird thing

going on. We are one another’s

storm, ravaging, proselytizing,

Then, we clean up the mess.

 

Somehow it works for us.

 

I needed to say it, so I did

 

I needed to say it

but refrained.

 

Would he deem me a slut

no longer a poet, luscious

and lyrical.

 

Would he see I’m not upper crust

just a Brooklyn born floozy

with a camouflaged accent,

straight from a home where

the plastic spoon cooked, and

 

a dowry of leftover pots, pans

and "who wants this crap" stuff,

after the ash scattered from

Aunt Lenore's funeral --

(there's not even some Lennox there)

 

Mulling over the time and the place

and our trite conversation -

 

I needed to say "fuck"

so I did.

 

I wear your rose

 

Within your streams, I curl

in swirls of scarletine calligraphy.

 

In sync we bleed, entwined within

the other. We are storm and

laceration, yet warriors at end of

days; both the culprit and the remedy.

 

I wear your rose -

its taint and its significance

its mark that sears the superficial flesh,

seeding deep within the inner wreath.

 

Once in fields, our  flowers wild, now

conjoined through blood and burrowed

birth, incisions by the needles weep -

we will however heal.

 

Our skins to wear our story

where the petals bloom perpetually.

 

That knock on your door

 

Through manicured lawns

the wretched and renegades

you’ve been trying to rid

in their prominent presence

 

dismissing their birth

written prophecy, as they

gather with numbers too

large to ignore.

 

An appropriate metaphor

for the lost, disenfranchised,

deserters, expatriates and to

some, a mere nuisance climbing

 

the hills and the fence of pretense

as they come in a flourish just to

knock on your door.

 

When he went away

 

Retrospectively, it was all

merely clockwork rehearsal

 

leading up to your

crossing that corridor

 

you were a gent of distinction

in a pinstriping pattern, a flutter

on blue sky reminder.

 

But not ‘til you rose those last notes

in your nightwing soliloquy

 

would I know what I’d miss

at my morningside window.

 

***

Thank you for reading the poetry

of Emalisa Rose