starfish...

i eat my words, as you suggest;
but they have lost their edge,
rubbed raw by make-shift sanity…
inside this raisin-walled world of me;
shriveled with age and too much sun…

i perch precariously on the rim of your truth
where I can just see inside
but cannot touch;
cells we mingled mid-air
have floated away,
our coarse agreement rusted
with tears…

i sing to you on the beach at night,
wondering if the words are important anymore…
we molded such fragile conditions, you and i;
but they conflicted;
love could not emerge in arenas of contradiction…
a fool crushed the shifting castle inside the cave;
now there is heavy silence and dread;
suspicion with no corners to weep…

the sun bakes my flesh
and saps all residue of moisture from my tongue…
the words, dead leaves of an old tale,
are scribbled in a foreign hand
on a sand bank…

the beach stretches on forever
like my mind—but i have forgotten the clues
allowing me to reach back
and experience the wet memories,
embellished by longing,
obscured by age and distance,
rewritten on the sands of time…

starfish...

soliloquies
ja allen