A four-o-clock bell compels my feet
to kiss the pair of Nikes
Like they always do,
As they groggily stamp the floors
Of the hospital letters. Flurries
Of rings, wheels, and screams
Inundate the once hallowed
Halls. He hands me the chart,
While he hands me his heart,
Unknowingly, indifferently, winnowed.
Gaze. It tears away, snatched
by her warped, unkempt strings
of numbers. No – harbingers of a tempest.
Her cries knell. Red stains wrapped
about with translucent pains and gauze.
Does she know who will be the purveyor,
The perpetrator,
Of her unsung requiem? Does she know?
The locks embracing the floodgates
cannot escape their sins. Whilst her gasps
Are rendered inchoate,
A beau, with a cold stench of orchids,
Struts
In, her chasm submerged upon his sight.
Might I let myself in
To change her, foil and all,
But save her from this white-feathered
Margrave?
Because I know, don’t I? Don’t you?
She does it, swift: carefully placing
The feline out of the bag, onto his lap.
It’s yours, it’s yours.
How can he say so, as her temple
Decomposes into its bony score, she trills incessantly
In her opening dirge. Finally.
It’s all here – nothing removed, but nothing
Was there, like the turn in the trick.
She knows
There will be no prestige, only a precious.
Now she
Surrenders the wrinkled fabric of the sun
And lets the redness of the moon gleam.
Artistic Peregrination 