Bittersweet

bittersweet

Swirling in the ashes of honey, I awake crying under a bridge. A blur of roses forcefully blooms in my lips letting faraway delusions plague me in the twilight. When the crepuscule flees while passionately kissing the horizon, when there is nothing to write, nothing right and nothing to feel, where do the lonely petals of sentiment go? The scream of silence reigns, misunderstood. My reflection in a tearful cup of tea has suddenly dulled reality.

© Margaux Emmanuel

sandpaper

Lining up

empty

soft drink

bottles

on the

windowsill

of a

dented heart

peering at

the streets

of silence

discolored

by daylight

you remember

a checkered

red and white

picnic cloth

flattened

burnt

grass

screeching

underneath

an orange tree branch

dipping in

a timid

foamless

ocean

sky

his honey skin

melting in the tide

pruney words

kisses

a chronic daydream

he never

draws hearts

with sidewalk chalk

but his initials

are sown

into the collar

of your reverie

you’re the 

dissociative

teenager

that can’t help

but miss him so.

© Margaux Emmanuel

bullet eclipse

an asylum for doubt

a saturated drought 

where your eyes spiral down

my arteries

unspoken words amble upon a shard 

of reason

of treason 

inoculation

against melancholia

palpitations

holding hands with dementia

I can now hear 

the moans of hysteria

 © Margaux Emmanuel

The way your eyes speak, hidden under those sunglasses in the ink-seeped night, where I can see the reflection of our nightmares’ neon headlights, where I can see a hanged man, life tugging at his throat, his foggy, unstringed eyes peering at the existential questions left at the gallows’ steps. Astray in the poetry of half-alighted movie theater marquees and of weeping red diner booths paralyzed under the sterilized silence of the blinding white lights interrogating and polishing the checkered floor tile, time stops. With blood-stained eyes and a delirious steering wheel, quarantine my heart and let me sleep.

roadside mirages | © Margaux Emmanuel

clumsy town boy

Your heart

is stuck

in a long

car ride

edging

an endless

desert

empty

road

in 1973

sitting in

the backseat

reading Kerouac

butter-colored

baseball cap

no watch

timeless

wrist

high school

bomber jacket

covering a

white shirt

a chagrined

blue bra

his

aviator

Ray Bans

sliding down

the bridge

of its nose

listening

to the cassette

of a shattered

existence.

Two years

thousands of miles

away

he’s still

the one

appearing

in the

highway landscapes

ghostlike

you can almost

smell

his cologne

you thought

that you had

written

the last act

of that

tragedy

licked the seal

of that envelope.

But the trunk

is still

full of his

letters

the cursive ink

bruises you

at night

oh

the clumsy

town

boys

they really

mess you up.

© Margaux Emmanuel

In the remainder of the tepid alcohol languishing in the flask of your eyes, we drink to the lost silhouette of love, burn our photographs wedged into the yellowed corners of our thoughts. We settle for cemented happiness, contemplating life through its glass corridors where mold is hidden, where I can feel the cracks of our suffering, where I can sense our hands dismembering our own poetry. When empty phrases harrow insomnia, I tape blossoms, breaths of life, to the pages of our unfinished chapters. But the trees’ barks where our initials dangle, imprisoned by a blistering heart, are peeling. I have just realized that flowers wither.

to slip on drunken petals 

© Margaux Emmanuel