Repression

What holds us together isn't magnetism,

the iron filaments in our veins are loosened

and drawn to opposing poles, and a woman,

I bleed in tides as if I am operated by the moon;

a puppet - its ashen consternation jolts

the cells to unite me with a river

in an unconscious symmetry with its currents;

the communication of chemical to chemical.

Our chiral hands let apples fall from them, 

letting go of these creeds of floods and egg

and errant serpents, all lost to gravity -

when we were fieldfares we turned 

our frightened faces in the same direction,

we tried to share shelter in a Hawthorn tree,

but there was always what the mind can't silence:

the ebb and flow of the demands of the body

for sleep and food, love and water and sex.

And then our perpetual debts

to each other that we repay and repay

in our commodities of emotions.

My warm blood simmers at a medium temperature 

on the stove, my warm blood, if stirred, 

thickens, slicks and sticks to vessels.

I have worked hard to repress and disavow

my feelings in my fear of them,

watched them depart my jittered skin

and waft their tar to adjacent rooms,

what's left of me releases 

it's cleaner scent of camphor,

my ribs emptied,

the cold gasp held at the rise of my chest;

many words are trapped there

where the water swallows the sharp ice

of stars and is frozen in a shimmer.

Image from pixabay