Marcus E. Darnell
GLASS
Glass petals from a glass rose
tremble down my tongue.
It told me to partake
its brittle, wristy, sugar face.
Its pollen rumbles in my lungs.
I cough shards delicately.
I scar my windows just by touching--
my armpits shatter just by reaching,
sprinkly eyelids wingedly there,
sheltering crystal eyeballs,
eyebrows snow-ghost hair.
I flake into a snowstorm, the sky agrees.
The sun, a magnifying bird,
magmafies my looking-glass heart.
I meteor stormless to the seas,
deprived of poisonous legacy
or recyclable soul.
The impact cuts my fire apart.
I am a cup of stomach sand,
a diamond-studded S.O.S.
Without my bulbs’ sexing
the darkness will cry.
My filament needs tender fixing--
I don’t want to die,
but alone and castle-dark one may try.
That none see me in fractures
I cannot forgive.
That my eyes are rubies in pictures
is no blood urge to live.
It is the purgatory of glass--
I am the transparent colossus
worshipped too long.
They pray right through my cracks,
recount irrelevant pain with stonehenge song.
They only know me as a dome,
I’m not half the cat’s eye I used to be.
I’m not the chip that bloomed to storm
or the coal that souled the sea.
I’m a funereal liquid too slow to fall,
an unhooded angel animal standing tall.
They mistake my rainbows for keys or cues
to commence my chiseled dissection,
but these hues are not heaven clues,
they are my screaming refractions.
I’m a country far away as flesh,
engraved into provinces senseless.
I would have been content to be
one step removed from shatter,
maybe hairline,
not holy fallen stone condemned to plain.
I wish I had found a middle--
not as a wrenching gust of northing glass dust
nor a plexi-doll worshipped spectrally,
just a glittered hump in the rain
without windshield, bubble, scratch or stain,
no blinding span of ache, name,
or enlightening, imprisoning riddle.
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