Green Peas at Stake

She Goes to Bed With Lights On

She first goes to bed
with lights on,
a modest hope chirping under her eyelids,
preferring to ignore the darkness,
trying not to feel,
trying to slip past herself,
trying to toss away dreams,
but a weak tear reappears over the misery of a rustle
of recall, a rumor she didn’t heed, like the whisper
of green caterpillar legs sliding on a leaf,
that forecast rose petals to be eaten away.

How vaguely she created an unrecognizable face,
a lover’s image,
her soft hands reaching to loss, dragging excuses,
tangling in calluses and shams!

No more hush-hush...

Her shriek, though internal, shrill and wild, pierces
through the lampshade, like the Munch drawing
“The Scream”; an outcry among black ink lines
tracing countless sobs, struggling for voice inside
the terror of the dark through a throat engorged with agony,
attempting to feel a horizon and go
beyond surrendering
to fury.

The chain of the lamp swells inside her hand as she pulls, daring
the ominous darkness.

To escape from a nightmare will not be easy,
unless she burns the bed.

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"Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies."- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Joy

image by SMS