You, The Marionette

you, the unstrung cello, with your factory hands and your crazy pale
hair, what do you think you're doing? knives for the kitchen and
kisses for the bedroom. you're supposed to be a healer. what else did
you think would be any use? no physician heals the self

you, the bad actor, you live in a sea of mirrors, you're running
through streets paved with faces cut from friends and family, you're
always lost in someone else's labyrinth. you told yourself you were a
chain on an angel but did you really think about it? your
storm-smashed glass, your excuses to be angry. you, the maker of the
sea. smiling shining everlasting if only it could always be that way

like furrows for planting seeds, red lines on your forearm. you, the
unimportance of damage. so what does it mean when you stand in the
empty white kitchen imagining yourself torn to pieces by knives.
something is calling you - let me go. you said it was the closest
thing to your dreams of flying, weaving through the rushhour animals
with a mind like a razor, a razor through meat. let me go past the
ring of hills into the psychic woodlands where dead pine needles
crunched under the soles of my shoes in the silence of sleeping
shadows. let me go out of the gravity well to swim in your space
hotel.

you, the imaginary one. you met your twin and he told you the truth.
he loved you and gave you the truth. where were you when the sky froze
and the neverending mirrors toppled into the darkness of the sea, when
the girl with no face danced the other universe open, when the star
maker was visible in the eyes of every living thing, where were you
when the fox screamed in the early morning through the fine mist of
the woods, where was your heart when everyone else was given theirs.
you, the island of the sun. you'd like to be marked. you'd like to be
special. you'd like to be noticed. you'd like to tear yourself apart.
you'd like to disappear. you, the one who was supposed to be loved and
never hated, the gazer upon the face of the dark waters. Nero was an
angler in the lake of darkness. we love for so many different reasons.
we are shaken through space and time until we are free.

you, the mercenary. a visionary in the pounding aftermaths of your
dreams, you're awake when you're invisible, forget what you think you
know. your blood solves nothing, your thoughts are telegrams sent too
late: when the door to the world of light closes stop you've seen all
this before stop you've pushed the demons back a million times stop
what new thing could you have to say now stop I broke myself, I lost
myself, I wanted to eat the tendrils of the sun, they were made of
gold sugar stop she told me I wouldn't ever die if I would only love

black windows falling. cold metal on your arm that you wish would bite
deeper than you meant. oops - an accident. It's nothing. something
bloody to show for all the wars you're going through. scars from
someone else's battle. you, the healer. two homes high above the
clouds, one a darkened pool of water that you fish in for tools,
weapons, secrets. one a bright, quiet house, hidden between two leafs
of a book with infinite pages. the clawed hand from the sky, the
thousand-fired city catacombed through a mountainside. you, the hero,
letting your friends pay the restaurant bill while you stare at the
new continent in the sky. so strange you never noticed it before. I've
been asleep all my life. crestfallen, ashamed, guilty. you stare at
their faces full of love, at your own hands, twenty years older than
you, the hands of someone shocked into silence and oblivion by a dead
baby, a dark-eyed girl. never meant to hurt. you. anyone. dust and
blood in spirals at the bottom of the broken staircase. the dread
ringing in your ears fading with the grateful, lying thought, this is
a dream as you give up the struggle and slip under the waves with your
dark sister. sometimes it's true. if it's false, you lose everything,
and start again with empty hands and a little more confusion. isn't it
better for everything to be real than unreal?

your little comforts. the blue sky at the top of the mesa, the
gravestones they turned into pavings for a park, dead acorns painted
gold and hung on a string for Christmas. you, turning death into life.
The mirror tells you that you're dying with every second. life into
death and death into life, the skeleton dancing in the valley of
skulls and snowdrops. baby heads pushing out of the frozen soil of the
suburban parks, the arcs of the suspension bridge lurking in the fog,
bubbles and frogspawn collecting in the corners of the shattered
cesspool. you, the witness, desperate for understanding. you, the
mariner. you, the firm grip, the knife, the cut, and the end of the
cut. you, the one who isn't harmed. you, the liar, the lie, and the
truth the lie tried to hide. you, the menu and the meal, the map and
the territory, the hand and the glove. you, the spiral flower.

offerings in the morning darkness to the empty chair, crying for a
mother who never existed. you held her out of the bathwater until her
death turned to life again. later by the wild shore raindrops closed
your eyes, shouts from the hillside from friends hidden in the ferns
and grass, hunting lemons and papaya for when the beach is set on
fire. we'll set it on fire. we'll offer it up if you want. anything
but what you're asking. you, the one who knows what the fire rituals
mean, you, who kissed the sand at the centre of the universe, you, the
only other person who saw the rainbow's end in the trees near the
jetty, while the storm rains churned the sea and you floated with no
dreams left.

the dreams came back. I am their playground, writhing between pillars
of lightning. I, astronaut, caught in the birth of something that
howls with flame and darkness. silent absolute zero burning through
your bones. you, the one in the sun's heart. this is my mind. this is
my gift and what it costs. to build bridges across a shifting sea, to
link the cold cores of stars. this is the other world you wished for.
I don't know how I didn't die.

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