Ashes by Sarah La Rocque

Ashes mixed and drunk.
The eyes
of a cat in the dark.
I am wallowing, mummified in mud. Every part of me is dead. From
within.
I burst
like a milkweed pod.
Forced to drink milk in the mental hospitals of the mind.
Reduced to an equation: game theory
1. Every game has rules.
2. Every game has a payoff.
Calculate me, master.
Seal me in transparent
plaster.
Put me in a museum for children to point at. Until my eyes open
phosphorescent.
Then they can no longer keep me. I walk away. Searching for you. To
remove
this plaster chastity belt.

Ginsberg was right: the burden is love
But love is not a tender thing.
Love smells from being contained in pressurized cans like anchovies
becoming fish, the hair of mermaids.

We are not free, but you know that better than I in your crystal castle,
looking high through your telescope
at real feelings.
Love:
Where the body is torn apart by wolves and reassembled incandescent. Not weeping for the deaths that were necessary for the constant
renaissance of the spirit.
Oh, you see it all. But you neither smell nor taste your mannequin
lovers who sacrificed themselves to you only to terrify you in dreams
without number.
Oh, you are an unfortunate king under a curse
I am in the apple orchard. You see me there searching naked for
unicorns. and men who stay.
Maybe I will find the unicorns. Men are made of dry corn sewn
in a poppet but then you try to hold them they are sand –
people at sunset. They melt.
My tears melt too.
But my tears are made of ice – my heart of padlocks.
That open to hummingbirds’ keys that will not be tamed,
anymore.
The female centaur in the entryway is laughing at me. She says I use
too many words to express the simple.
But it is in these complex costumes and masks that I catch the
conscience of the king.
His castle is locked with a rusty iron gate.
There are no gargoyles to gargle the rain that comes because mother
sky
weeps.
She weeps lemonade,
alcohol
and acid.
She sings,
a song only I
can hear.