Coffee

Coffee

mid-September early morning rain drinking coffee remembering and forgetting hoping while despairing waiting for light waiting to end wishing wishing don’t answer this prayer don’t read the letter don’t open the box don’t let them see you don’t let them know the smile is a cut the laughter is a wound the world is a lie and childhood is a place where pain lives forever

©️ JM Tiffany

Paper

I was squeezed and folded through the origami of denial, my paper-thin yesterdays formed of abandoned dreams.

With each crease I was pinched and flattened into the shape of a bird. So many flightless words, sharply folded into a beak that could not sing.

Though once forgotten, she later found me, and touching my edges, I came undone.

I was laid out like a map, the angled scars of my memory laid bare.

The words of the past still scrawled on my chest, I was pinned to the wall and marked with a kiss.

There I stayed for many years, until yellowed and brittle.

My edges torn, she took me down.

Her clouded eyes rained on my skin and I sank into dark rivers toward the sea of her chest.

She crushed the wet ruin of my body against hers, and finally, I sang, between sobs, the hymn of her truth to the woman she never was.

Then, at last, I was torn out of memory, and tossed in the trash, her beautiful voice cast away and abandoned like paper-thin yesterdays.

© JM Tiffany

The People That We Were

When I learned how the world had laid its savage hands on you, I shattered.

A single cruelty’s world-ending reverberations echoed in the cavitation as Hell bloomed, rippling in the wake of this violent deed.

Like some horrible dream in which I could not move, only witness, only struggle, I watched as the cuts appeared.

Shrapnel and fire, debris and smoke.

A train, big and black as a thousand ravens.

Impact was immanent.

All of us were straining to move…

Move!

But we couldn’t.

A dark thing of fire and evil came at you. Came at me. A big fucking train, and you tied to the track, and me running in place, and you tied to your fate, and fate tied to us, and the black fire came.

Smoke and steel and darkness was all.

I pumped my limbs in a blind night of eternal terror.

I moved my legs as if it mattered.

I broke my limits and broke myself.

I was only a thing made of string.

I was ripped apart by centrifugal forces, my glowing embers spiraling into nothingness.

It was a long time I hurtled through shadows.

I was running to save you, and running to save me from myself.

I ran until my body broke and scattered it’s ruin in the deep ruts of vain pursuit.

When I woke, I looked for my pieces next to yours but found only parts of myself that I hated and bits of you, dismembered and disremembered.

Parts of us were taken and parts of us were lost.

Were you a victim or a survivor? What was I?

When they found us, we were stung by needles, and strung along until haphazardly stitched into one another.

“This won’t hurt much, you’ll just feel a little pinch.”

Time pulled the thread. Pulled us here, and pulled us there. Pulled us to where we could be together or just feel safe alone. Pulled us forward. Pulled us out. Pulled us up above the smoking wreckage of the people that we were to a brighter place soft enough for who we would become.

©️ JM Tiffany

Honey

I was thin, a razor passing between hurting and healing.

Naked among monsters, and hungry for love, I cut the rope about my neck to bind you at my side.

You were a flame and I was on fire.

Everything I touched turned to smoke.

I breathed you in with blackened lungs and coughed until I bled, spilling myself over the pale embers of our fallen stars.

I lost you in the ashes yet found myself blooming in the night.

And, like all that blossoms, I grew amid death.

The stinging bees kissed me sweetly and drank my life, even as they made their hive in your skull.

Their honey ran like tears from your eyes but I know that you never cried.

Not for me.

Never once for me.

©️ JM Tiffany

Mad

Beneath a tracery of wires and glimmering stars we planted the seeds of our sinister intentions:

To go mad with pleasure.

Spreading, touching, shrieking like birds, talons gleaming black. Cries from the deep. Blur of living visions. The mouths of hounds and dark carrion birds. We consumed each other, we Eaters of The Dead.

Like little promises, our fingers laced and locked.

We clung to each other throughout the night, until, like shadows, shifting between worlds, it all seemed to fall apart.

The terrible machinery of her emotions burned behind eyes that demanded blood.

I gave her reasons without apology for the sacrifice, and lay softly upon the altar.

Only fools guard their throats in the presence of love. I bared mine, inviting my ruin like an old friend.

Instead, she collapsed; the weight of her lay on me like a shivering blanket.

Though the Dawn found us we had lost ourselves only to wake in each other’s dreams.

©️ JM Tiffany

Mirror

I longed for release, and cried out until…

The Wound Mother came.

Howling, she squatted over The Black Wolf’s jaws.

I screamed into The Void as it licked my skin.

I wanted to be small, to be delicately held, to know the feel of loving hands.

But I was swallowed by shadows and caged by fangs.

I wanted to be a ghost then, to make something soft from something hollow.

I wanted to shine, but I was broken. I became a mirror, and all who saw themselves in me bled at my edges.

©️ JM Tiffany