To Love a Woman

It is not the moon, I tell you.

It is these flowers, painted everywhere with autumn leaves. And the fragrance of which I feel inside me, achingly suffocating.

I have gone mad. It is not the moon. It is the flowers. The voice does not go away.

I can feel it. I have lost it, I have lost it, I have lost it.

I am insane.
I am crazy.
I know it.

She wants to know why I still talk to her, I suppose, when she takes away the flowers and the perfume, the dancing blue light, the talk of love.

I try to turn away, to walk away, to make her leave me alone.
To pretend that I do not hear. She begins to whisper again, this time, just before the whisper, her voice comes under the clatter of the rain.

The sound of the dripping from the outside looks like the flow of blood in my veins.

Is that the way we are born?
In a house under the rain and blood in my veins.
Is that what it takes to be a woman?
Is that what love means? For a woman to love a woman?

There is no rain, and there is no blood.
I know. There is no light, only a thick and swirling
greyness.

I cannot see for the blood.
I cannot see for the blood.
It was my mother’s blood.

She loved her so much and I love her now,
but she loved someone else and took away
the flowers.

There is no rain, and there is no blood,
only night. There is no morning, only night.

There is no blood, only blood, only blood,
and night.

And yes, there is a taste in the air so vivid, so alive
that my lips part, my fingers pull apart, my eyes closed,
and I know, as the taste swells in my mouth, as it rises,
rapidly, from my lips, as it gathers, then unfolds, and
achingly slowly, into a string of words, and a voice,
I remember the voice, that I have not heard since childhood.

But he has taken it away.
He has taken it away.
He has stolen it away.

It is only her I love.

:: 05.08.2022 ::