Iron Roses

Exhaustion sometimes over takes us and our dreams are the only relief. But what are dreams? Visions of other worlds? Other lives? The reinterpretation of data, sensory input, creative outbursts as our brains try to make sense of an insane world. We are often left with striking images that sink away to infinity and stretch on to the stars. We can find ourselves trapped in the dark alone or reliving the past or anywhere in between.

I live in this

Insular place indwelt by flames

Wandering eyes caught in disgrace

Exhuming corpses

In the wake of this cosmic dust

Clouds creating newborn stars

A trillion billion other worlds

All made of empty words

Cut out the petals on this flower

Strike them with a blade

Making myself a piecemeal heart

But I'll never let it change

Like a rose caught in a hurricane

Beaten and depressed

Crashing through the avenue

On bended knee impressed

Hastily these altars fall

One by one apocryphal

Lost in another ritual

Barely enough blood to scrawl

Against the doom nothing defends

Arrogance instead of ignorance

Where fire goes to die

Empathy to apathy and then regret

Remember how we danced

In passions unrenounced

Highlights beneath a starlit sky

Ancient pathways fed

Painting the inside of eyelids

With images of what we did

A chapel, a temple, of remembrance

And now I live in this

Cycle on empty

Revving an engine already dead

Fed to the coals as I hit the ground

But it's barely breathing in

These iron roses bare their thorns

Cutting to the blood and bones

Against the expanse we look like ants

Connected as these neurons flash

Hungrily these teardrops fall

One by one apocryphal

Lost in another ritual

Barely enough time to scroll

Cut short and built up

Blocked off with exhaust

Exhuming fumes of your dust

Buried here beneath a stone

A path I thought might lead us back

Going nowhere fucking fast

Iron roses and steel grass

And I'm fucking barefoot

I live in this

Prismatic memory of losing everything

Unbearable ephemeral in between

Consistently reliving the loss of constancy

Iron Roses (I Live in This)

Photo Credit: Jovana Nesic (Pexels)