[x]

suckleyou pry me open
like a blood orange:
a scrape of sugar on my tongue,
a taste like sunrise.

you take in
the salt and slick and
split
of my thighs,
the pulped tomato
of my heart,

the fabric and
steel bones
of an artificial ribcage

as you unknot
them all.

I draw my first
deep breath
and it smells of citrus
and coitus and
you

systemhe said that one day I,
who have grown accustomed
to accumulating moons,
drawn like moths
to my Venus-brightness,
would meet my match.

he told me I would be
captured by the brilliance
of a star,
a Betelgeuse, a behemoth:
supergiant turned supernova turned
supermassive black hole.

he informed me, peeking out
from under my gravity,
his erratic elliptical orbit,
that one day I would be
swallowed up

and that it would be poetic justice.

equinoxsummer is
strawberry-flavoured
emancipation,
a subtle shift in the light.

drifting, you
start to miss the ivy
that crawled over your eyes
and shielded them from shadows.

as for myself,
I think I’ve fallen in love
with the idea of it,
soporific, spindling, sublime:

all the s's in your name
straightening their spines
in sequence.

can you hear the sudden hush
of a shifting season?
listen: shake the snow from your hair
and breathe.

mea culpaI know how you
pay court to contrition,
wear blame like a veil
(under which you are witch-white,
purity-pale).

your mouth twists in a
parody of apology,
an apoplexy of nervous
mannerisms.

you and I both know
that this is my fault—
yet you take the fall.

me: a criminal without punishment—

you: a sinner without a sin.

I wonder which of us is the
sorrier spectacle—
which would inspire more
sympathy?

the jury is out,
but on this they agree:

we're a carnival sideshow,
you and me.

dark and deepdepression is
an eyeless beast,
coal-black and indigo,
that has wrapped itself
around my mind
like a snake, a
tourniquet.

loosening, restricting,
it plays me
like an accordian—
"stay in bed today,"
it hisses,
insidious as an insurgent,

or
"slit your skin
into thin, shiny ribbons"
or
"slip the noose
around your neck and
pull
"

Londonthe city glows
bright copper, a scandal in
oil colours,
a luminous quivering waste
of fog and smoke.

I feel on my skin
the harsh glare of street lights,
a thick caking of
make-up, the lingering
sting
of a parting kiss.

these streets are a string
of catastrophes,
a bright orgiastic tumbling,
the future glinting red
in a wine glass.

nothing like the sunit occurs to me
that I do not love you
as much as I should.

your voice is not
musical to me,
is not by far
my favourite sound:
I prefer the skeletal
tones of a harpsichord,
the rustling of the pages
of old books,
the wild clanging
of a projector
winding up its film.

nor do your eyes
hold for me
visions of the stars,
in all their fierce, deranged
intesity: I love the sight
of a massive, gaseous
binary system
more than that of your
primitive lenses.

the touch of your hands
sends me in no quixotic raptures
that the lazy fronds of a lily
or the crushed softness of velvet
could not—
skin is skin, and quite frankly,
I've felt better.

I ha

on irrationalityI begin to think that I am
selfish, headstrong,
obstinately cruel:

ridiculous as a gardener
who stops tending
to a bed of flowers,

only to be
shocked and grieved
when weeds begin to grow.

alienthe flagrant impossibility,
the undeniable otherness of you
(ineluctable and raw
as a cracked egg,
a sunrise)
glints in every turn of your eyes.

you are a universe
unto yourself,
a system of Heavenly bodies
heavy with influence:
planets whir at your fingertips,
massive and
subatomic.

I wonder how you see me:
as a dispassionate judge of the cosmos,
my actions a blur in a sea of
equal and opposite?

or—do I excite you?
do you ponder the
composition of my atmosphere,
the molten heat at my core?

do you ever,
for a single, measured moment,
forget your station
and allow yourself to be pulled
into my gravity,
playing electron to my
nucleus:

R1But it's so easy to talk about you
when you live on my taste buds;
intoxicated nights, blueprinted flirting,
and the ineffable charm
that came with your heartache design.

introspectdo you remember the rainy evening
when you showed me the architecture
of your heart?

columns of dead languages
and old money, ivy strangling
the crumbling stone:

quelle allure!

I had quite despaired
of ever seeing such a place, but you
forced open the wrought-iron gates

and allowed me to take over—
modernity manifest
in my hesitating touch.

I crept over the courtyards
like some brilliant, beautiful
bed of weeds.

fizzlea spark of tension,
a small, elegant silence:
the world in mourning

little white dressesI came across a river
foaming at the mouth
with eyes wide and brackish
abnormally drawn out

it's here you were christened
in your dreamish waterbed
storming and whirling
brought to a monstrous head

and it's here you were denied
the cure that you sought
a palliative, I could be
but an antidote, I'm not

so I gazed upon your image
liquid and sublime
breathless and restless
caught inside your mind

and your little white dresses
your little white dresses
your little white dresses
your bouquets and halos
your little white dresses
your little white dresses
your little white dresses
your snowstorms and snow globes

between garish garlands
your vis

steps in letting gobathed in sleep
as if emerging from a dream
I rise, sick with
remembering—
splintered, spangled, dewy irises
and a throat tense with
words.

imagine that I don’t
shiver
as I cross through worlds,
cover my footsteps,
pluck the lilies I had planted
and leave you barren.

imagine that my love,
sticky as the nectar of peaches
and far less sweet,
was little more than a
pit for you to choke on,
a lump of sap
to dissolve in your mouth.

imagine that I
leave you much as I
always have been:
faerietale-like, ephemeral
as the last lingering
snowdrops of spring.

last of all, imagine
(and this is most important)
that you don’t feel
my p

carnal luxuriaif your body is a temple,
I’ve spent hours
worshipping my own personal gods:
scorching you with
the idle fire in my palms,
another psalm I mean
to desecrate.

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More from *toxic-nebulae

ambivalenceit seems that I have lost
my senses,
dripping corduroy blue:

a glass of condescension
and I'll deny everything you've
said.

somewhere between the pastry paint
and the religious
beads of sweat

from your lips to your navel
I've trapped myself
in a cage I lost the keys to.

this is where insanity begins:
too much attention
wasted on the wallpaper

and hours spent meeting anything
but your eyes.

as i'm cradled in the circulation
within alcoholic corks
and blue headlights

your voice tapping at my senses,
your lips replacing mine.

the secret is that I cannot do enough screaming
to drown you out

and I can't be quiet enough
to

princepresumptuousness was never
much of a virtue.

you can keep your glass slipper,
your velveteen promises:
I'll have none of your premature
gluttony.

this is not a betrothal.
you, with your opinions
determined to break through
your skin - have you never
thought to look, to ask?

lightning does not strike
so fast.

don't think that you besmirch
my dignity, the irony
of my composure--

you posture as a hero
without a hook on which
to hang your sword.

have you forgotten
the snap that fire leaves
behind? don't believe
in what has not been said.

oh, bondageas a woman, of course,
I am but a doll created to please.

observe: I have straps at the ankles and
knees, a pretty pleated dress

and a tiny upturned nose (that they made for me
when I turned twenty-three).

look: is the curve of my lips
not perfection? I give a wry smile,
to demonstrate to your satisfaction—

yes, yours, sir.
don't you want to take me home?

reductionI'll tell the truth:

I am a thief of the
worst persuasion.

if you want honesty,
I don't think that we will
last.

give it one or two
or three years—
years tense with opposing forces
and unusual magic—

and our reaction will be
complete. we will both
go back to our own kinds.

haven't they always defined love
in terms of chemistry?
(opposites attract,
but like dissolves like.)

and here is the confession:
here is why I am odious:
I know this and
I will not withdraw.

here is the electron bridge—here the
anode, cathode, the ill-fated
reactants.

I set this up like dominos;
I wield it lik

autopsythink of this as matrimony,
a kind of implicit vow,

or at least a grudging compromise
between guard and prisoner.

understand: I will see more of you
in these few hours
than any lover ever has.

my hands, encased in latex,
will caress far deeper, far
more intimately than any touch
you received while alive.

I will know the folds of your skin,
the colour of your heart,
the weight and feel of every
palpable thing
inside you—

and without your consent, with you
powerless to stop me.

I choose to think of this as love.

standoffdawn hisses and spits
in my bowed head, the wide
arch of my back:
I am reborn in sweltering silence.

I approach you unnoticed
sinless, yet. my strike,
malevolent as your gaze,
abides by negotiations.

I won't have your treaties
and treatises, your cowardly
circular games--
my eyes are full of blistering fire.

let this be as it is, then.
stipulations are worthless
by way of a stiff-necked caviler.
you wreak your own brand of ruin.

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thrall

by *toxic-nebulae, Jan 29, 2013, 1:39:33 PM
Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

you were two parts of the same thing,
two stars of the same system:
binary, temporal, constrained.

like a sun courting a planet,
you cycled through your phases,
tethered to her by the strength

of a solar flare,
electromagnetic storm.

without her,
you are still ultraviolet and pristine,
your cold, clean light—

but the sparkle has left your surface.

you orbit around
an imaginary object,
a placeholder for her gravity.

thrallby *toxic-nebulae

Literature / Poetry / Emotional / Free Verse

©2013 *toxic-nebulae

written for #Shelf-of-Friends's January prompt contest: [link]
one of the available prompts was to begin with the line "you were two parts of the same thing."

best of luck to everybody who entered!

~jagrier Mar 15, 2013 Professional Writer

Featured in a post entitled "Poetry + Art: Speculative." [link]

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*toxic-nebulae Mar 15, 2013 Student Writer

<3 thank you!

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~v-espertine Feb 20, 2013

i feel this piece, especially the "placeholder for gravity"... you know the metaphor for relativity in the space time continuum, that space-time is like a sheet that covers over masses; what would happen if all the mass in the universe was removed but gravity still interacted with it like it was there- all these invisible and undetectable forces everywhere, like a minefield of black holes. i might fall asleep thinking about this. thank you. (:

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*toxic-nebulae Feb 20, 2013 Student Writer

no, thank you!

Reply

~arabesque-o Jan 31, 2013 Student Photographer

_{you have an amazing way with words.}

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*toxic-nebulae Feb 1, 2013 Student Writer

thank you!

Reply

~Mr-Timeshadow Jan 31, 2013

I hope you publish someday! The stellar-themed poetry alone would make a nice volume of work, and a fairly distinct one at that! How often do you ever see this theme, particularly as a metaphor for romance...

Reply

*toxic-nebulae Feb 1, 2013 Student Writer

Reply

~Mr-Timeshadow Feb 1, 2013

I hope you recover soon, but hey -- at least your family is coming soon to offer aid and comfort!
Oh, and you're welcome!

Reply

*IAmPoetry Jan 30, 2013 Hobbyist Writer

Beautiful and this part is awesome: "like a sun courting a planet,
you cycled through your phases,".

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