Lure, Endure

By | 3 December 2025

You know what I found
in your centre
of metal, mortar?
Within, wet fruit, bound
in flesh, convulsing
with shame, bare
in the wrong street.
Here you were, refusing age
time’s demands—
discipline, elegance, tact—
as this void thirsted
for a bloodless happiness
it once knew, small but enough
& once upon a morning, thin enough
to have woven
into a world of green glass—
Let me now rescue
that bright pleasure,
O joy-idiotic, all mine; warm sun
coiling its way into moist
intestines, never even coming
to know its unknowing. The aught,
that Body-Before you were cornered,
a simpler light had thrived inside us.
One we kept awake for
till the end of our days—
Do you know revenge is only revenge
when it is proportional to the crime?
Not your fault, the doctors
had intoned. Ants crawled in
as desire does, on the soft, lone
carcass of a butterfly. What is this
pale shame sitting in your eyes?
answer it. Let me. It’s a slow
drawl under cotton sheets,
low hum of devastation
come to congeal you
into silence.
And you, do you let it eat
your remaining days?
Are you breathing,
may I
enter?

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