Cracking Sugar

 

For the record let me tell you

that your silence has reached me.

 

The clusters of green pepper in the forest

dangling like earrings from ears of tall branches 

slice the night air pungently

like a sword lancing silk

and I know that sound.

It is the same as the silence 

convulsing noiselessly between us.

 

Let me tell you 

that I imagine your hands 

rippling in the cosmos

touching everything - stars, moon

the ankles of darkness, the elbows of waiting...

everything but this void festering 

between your tongue and mine

This wordless blister

This mute lesion 

defining us, the way a scar defines an accident.

 

Let me tell you 

that the world is no longer hunger, thirst or spasm 

or satin or silk or velvet...

It is this withdrawal -

this pull out of resonance

that once bed rocked our lake,

docked in our animation

but now lies buried beneath scabs of choices.

 

I watch it glisten and harden 

like sugar cracking at boiling point

... growing opaque as it coats our lives.

 

For the record let me tell you

that the pain is in the decision

not in the silence itself.

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