Picking Up the Pieces

My lips taste nothing but fear

It has the salty taste of blood

Mixed with the warmth of tears that dried

I touch a hand to my face and imagine

The rain continuing right through the skin

To press into the pulsing

Silver-stained veins.

My beautiful fantasies are born

And weaned from the foxglove

That withered my body, turned my eyes

To its violent delights

The sleepy red poppy

That adorns my body in droplets of crimson

The sign of loss

That mourns the time

Or is just my masochistic monster

Waiting for release?

The fallen angel sleeps, holding a match

Under her wings, watching them burn

Letting the feathers cover her skin

As the devil sends his snake

Fastening around my wrist

I scream as it moves and bends

Weaving sinister visions

Around a wilting cross

Spun with thorns

Laced with rosary beads of blood.

The pyre roars with the fury of a thousand beasts

The ashes spin and I press myself into them

Marking my skin with the war paint of the dead

They embrace me like a departed lover

And I weep for my breaking heart

Peeling back the scar to see the skin hatch

Until the ropes unravel and snap.

A wolf’s howl breaks the silent night

The sky ruptures and the Moon now raises its blind eye

To look upon the corpse of the forest

Shattered bones, ripped green skin

A creature cries out, the ravens scatter

To blacken the sky with shrieks

Diving to feast, to dirty glossy feathers

With a sinner’s blood

I scream in the night

The creatures call for me and I raise my head

I am no stranger to the hunt

I wait to skin the hide of the stars, to look upon them

Watch as they fade and die.

I am temptress of no one

Distorting nothing into everything

Madness is the music to which I dance

Spinning in this skin of cloud and diamond rain

My hands reach out spinning on this dizzying

Directionless journey

North pulls me to South

Where the Sun touches the Moon

This eclipse arrives impassioned with tenderness

South receives West and East

Where the Earth pulls the oceans behind her

Away from this unbroken road.

And I howl with uncontained joy

As the world crumbles

The Sun falls to the Earth

Spreads golden fire as it accepts its fate

A red Sun never to rise

The Moon is left to lament

For it will rise again as the Sun dies

The Night starts its flight across the sky

Spreading wide veiled wings

Proclaiming his victory over the light.

As I fade away among the strangeness

Of this song-less night

I allow Pandemonium to finally stir

From his dreamless sleep

And open his beautiful starlight-stained eyes

To my shrieking

Burning world

He rises and he is beautiful

Graceful

Perfection’s face

But I know he is a liar

A conniver and a killer

Hiding his true form

Behind a coward’s mask.

I know as I lie here

Curled up on the floor

Rocking back and forth

He lies beside me

In this cell I have made

Singing in my ear tuneless melodies

His lips touch my cheek

Siphoning my screams

His arms lock around me

Holding me to his soundless heart

A statue of flesh and blood.

I know only these ludicrous thoughts

Bleeding through this mask of twisted mind and matter

But he separates madness and sanity

Life from death

Darkness and light

Black and white

Leaving me to wander in too much gray

I wake again, barely conscious

Of myself laying in broken knives of glass

Reflecting an unknown face

Each with a tear upon a marble cheek.

This era in existence is a title

A name no one will speak

In fierce whispers of obsession

In whispers of hate

Because this era is Death’s awakening.

Pandemonium reaches out with eager fingers

And takes my broken crown from my dying hands

The burden is lifted

As he appoints himself sovereign

Over the cries of the shattered and dying

While I close myself up into my corner of the world

And watch him disappear into the fire and darkness

Of his kingdom’s womb.

I find Death’s welcoming embrace waiting

Between the withered lips of a white rose

That had been left on the broken ground

To inhale innocent blood.

Insanity is my name

Though I don’t really know why

I call myself this—it is meaningless now

Lunacy has no meaning.

I wake—and find myself lying on the cold bathroom floor

Suffering yet another attack—the voices won’t stop

I feel like Joan of Arc as she spoke to the angel Michael

But I spoke to my personal demons that screamed and took flight in victory

Assuming the faces of angels for me.

I pick myself off the floor—picking up the pieces of myself

As I do every time and look at myself in the mirror

I am not foolish, I am not insane

I am myself, affected by my disease that shapes the voices and places in my head

And over time, I’ve come to realize:

Picking up the pieces of a schizophrenic, of those delusional,

Is like picking up shards of glass.