Neon Colored Eternity (A Poem)
I see the light in your eyes,
Remnants of neon colored insanity,
The dance of infallible chemicals throwing a tantrum in your brain,
Then fading out,
Turning into nightmares
Where beautiful amethysts hide inside a hollow rock,
And clever white horned demons seduce you each night.
Stale, stable and your conundrum hidden so well
It falls upon me to notice.
Your hollow eyes turn grey under the light,
I look at you but you can’t see me,
It’s not that you are blind,
But apparitions are grey,
And though there is beauty in the moment,
You are not a part of it,
Just a black hole in the midst of it all.
I walk towards the tall pillar,
A pile of broken bones underneath my feet,
Splinters sticking into my flesh,
And the sound of the crushing death
Is almost maddening.
On my way home over the perilous swamp
I see the ogre underneath the olive tree,
I know it resides there and I know its movements
So I can sneak underneath the light when its looking the other way
And then dart between its legs towards the hill on the other side
If I’m lucky it won’t even catch a whiff of me.
When I get home the smell of sulphur overpowers everything,
He’s here again,
The white horned devil,
His teeth are red and his eyes as dark as my deepest nightmares.
“How do you do?” He asks politely and hands me a cigarette,
I take it from him and let him light it for me,
feeling like a movie star
or a miserable fake,
I blow smokecircles into the air
and then I create small smoke dogs with my tongue.
They go jumping through the circles,
One after the other,
It’s a symphony of the eye,
manipulation of the unspoken word.
“I love you,” he says
And suddenly I can’t see the devil anymore,
Just this ordinary human being who spent the day
Slaving at a desk,
I don’t feel equal to him.
I feel inadequate, slow,
a shard that once belonged to a human being,
now forever broken into a million pieces.
“Oh, I just remembered,” I tell him and he looks at me
A fragment of something new in his eyes, curiosity,
Or perhaps he’s just horny.
“I love you too,” I say and smile at him. “I always forget,”
I meant to tease him,
but he sighs and turns away.
And that’s when I remember you again
and my face falls flat
Because how can I love him, when I have you on my mind
Your faded blue jeans, the fragile tone of voice as you whispered my name,
A sliver of the sky reflecting in your eyes,
The smell of the day still on you, your breath warm,
uneven
as you caress my shapelessness
With your blinding eyes.
“I wish you would notice,” I remember whispering into the air
And you looked at me, for an instant as if you saw,
As if we were really lovers
And not just passing souls,
But then the song changed
And the neon color in your eyes turned from
Pink to green to bright, light blue
The color of a beach I never visited.
His eyes are nightmarish,
dark again,
The horns white as snow.
“You’re staying here tonight?” He asks.
And I can almost feel the grin on his lips.
“I guess,” I mumble and crawl into bed.
He makes love to me, slowly, dispassionately,
Thoroughly.
And I close my eyes and see your silhouette
as you turned to the dance floor
Dancing to the beat
Alone in the world.
The dance of the dead.
The ogre sits in the swamp,
Underneath the olive tree
by the light post.
He has a picture of you between his large hands
It’s crumbled, old
You have braces
And you’re smiling at me,
“I love you, I always will,” you said that day,
But I never said the words,
Not then but a hundred times since.
As the moon turns into a silver bullet
Threatening to devour the dark wolves running in the night
I realize that the curse was cast on me
And not on you.
You don’t even remember
The pale white ghost
Of the girl who used to be on the dance floor with you
Neon colored synapses thrashing through her brain,
Until she couldn’t breathe,
“You’ll dance till you die,” you said,
And then I did.
He rolls off me, carefully he uses toilet paper to clean me up
Then he vanishes into the bathroom,
Such a delicate creature this white horned demon I share my eternity with.
“I love you,” I whisper into the darkness,
But the only answer is the growling of my own stomach,
The night is young,
Your nightmare never ending,
And I can never reach it,
I hear your breath speed up,
Your heart aches with anxiety, with strain,
But still, the hollow rock is intact
And the amethyst inside,
Such a beautiful purple color,
Will be intact forever.
“It’s where I keep my love for you,” you told me once,
Tongue-in-cheek, tongue on lips,
Hollow, empty heart
Silvery, slippery eyes
You always licked your lips when you lied.
The ogre sits underneath the light,
He will never let me pass again,
Not without a fight.
The white horned demon comes out of the bathroom,
I pretend to sleep.
He turns off the light
The darkness of his eyes deeper than anything else in the room.
“Will you let me go tomorrow?” He whispers,
smiles,
I can hear it in the way he says the words
“Will you let me go tomorrow?” echoes through my mind.
But I can’t tell him that I let him go every morning,
But that he always returns of his own free will
Just like I return,
Because I am but an apparition,
A gust of wind in your hair,
A whiff of smoke in the air around you,
A word falling from a strangers mouth,
And you will never remember,
Because it was you who died that day,
And I turned into a ghost.
