No Title For Life

I don’t want to let you go but it hurts my hands to hold the rope

It’s cold as a tomb
And it’s dark in your room
When I sneak to your bed to pour salt in your wounds

Concrete and water
She’s looking for her daughter
At midnight in torrential downpour

In a car outside we stalk the idle kind
If you’re leaving just let me know

Tobacco and peppermint
Dusting for fingerprints
A film in her eyes from the glow

My tears burn the skin where the crows tried to place their feet

The smell of tobacco clung heavy to his coat in the rain

Begins with W because it makes you weep

Bury your feet in the ground

They invited me into a sparsely lit room, where the cracks between the curtains resembled hands searching for someone to hold

I watched as he slowly descended those decrepit stairs, rubbing his bruised wrists with an ointment pungent of sour oranges

His gaze was fixed on himself, as if to tell the room this was his domain before looking at me in my cautious eyes, three steps above

He took out his rusted, thin-lined smudged spectacles from his chest pocket to gaze at my soul as if searching for something no one else had seen before

And in a raspy broken voice that concluded he drew from his mahogany pipe more than his throat had liked, he asked; “Do you wish to join this house?”

You have to listen to me and yourself

You have to listen to yourself and me