One Solstice

Macabre sloshes of black and red, imbued with the sting of chlorine, crust the constellations on my fingers with death finely. This is the mirage I envelope through the mail, under the pretense of a cop. I sleuth easily through summer heat, sliding through windows with autumn leaves hanging on to me, graying through winter solstice. I flourish in tendrils of dreams and the hasty flutter of hands. I hoard a graveyard of past misery, and my name printed fresh in the obituary sometimes vexes me.

I sleep upon pinpricks of elusive hurt, but the fictitious touch of hot and unabashed skin against flushed ice makes it bearable by the hour. I skid, often utterly unintentional, in between monochromatic strokes of the taste of rain and night. I tend to scratch at the spines of chatoyant light, sighing out, shrieking out, prisms of need. But there goes the beckoning shadow of a once tangible sun—it slaps me at the back of my head and shovels me into the recesses of my mind. Exclusive, only to the sprites that have chosen to abandon ship. And I hear the resounding laughter of demons in my heart, where all my farewell letters always end up, shrinking, tucking, shivering, dissolving, into disease.

There is the sound of cracking wood, roasting in the fire, working up my heart. I'm in a site of warmth. There is a beauty that knocks on the doors of my atria. My breath falls like the first snowflake, crisp and hellish and kissable, and I tally the times I've ever felt like this.