Heal

Heal

Sometimes it takes a few well-made incisions to heal.

Sometimes another cut is what it takes.

Sometimes we need to be broken again in order to set the bone.

Healing is not symmetrical. It is never uniform, never all at once, and rarely easy.

And some wounds, they never heal. Few will admit it. They prefer the myth of the healing clock. Don’t be like them.

Don’t wait on time to fix you. You will bleed to death if you wait.

Apply pressure. Send up a flare. Stay conscious. Hold on to awareness, and listen to your pain.

It asks only this: that you acknowledge what is happening, and that you give yourself what you need.

Help may or may not be coming. In the meantime, take care of yourself and surrender to the rough work of healing.

©️ JM Tiffany

The Hell of Ten Thousand Kisses

Why did I want you?

Dark hole obscured by leaves. Empty sound of listless breath.

“Must... fill... this... chasm…

Need... more... souls... for... The Hell of Ten Thousand Kisses!”

(Maniacal laughter).

We stuffed each other into one another’s wounds.

I wasn’t empty but I felt hollow and the shape of your pain slotted neatly into mine.

Sometimes love is messy, like Jackson Pollock or blood spatter analysis.

It’s a miracle we survived, and something definitely died.

Naivety? Trust? The jury is out.

I’m clinging to hope… or maybe just discovering it.

I wanted you because anything was better than being alone with myself.

Now all I want is solitude and a peace so enduring that living things nest in it.

I have let Nature reclaim me and sink into the bliss of this Apocalypse.

©️ JM Tiffany

I Am A Ghost Amid Invisible Ruins

Most will never see me. They will never know the quick knife of pain, taught and arced, gasping for breath.

They will never know the blistering sparks of the burning nerve.

They have not crawled through the numb fires of broken columns, or the warped shadows of dead futures.

They will never know the well studied ceiling, the constellations of textured paint and cracked plaster.

They cannot grasp the listless longing of endless unwanted rest. They will never know how I used to run and leap, will never know the power, strength, and grace of my body or how it was ruined in pursuit of glory.

They will never know how I wished for death, or how I ran towards it.

They cannot understand that I would jump once more into the fire.

©️ JM Tiffany

Maze

The city seemed a metaphor, an abstraction of a mood.

Rained on and darkly luminous, its angular translucence was streaked and slick with glittering clarity.

It was full of seeing, yet I felt small and invisible beneath the droop of dripping awnings.

Wet traffic sounds rode warped lasers of neon reflection between crystal bullets of falling cold.

Shifting on tired feet from bookshop to bar, I moved like a chain of causation.

Rattling in the wind, I was a ghost ship waiting for my anchor to bottom out.

There was a black-and-white photo of a naked French girl I had taken just days before I met you.

She was tucked in my book next to a song about you, and everything took on a strange symmetry.

I felt lost in every well-known place, and lonely amid the familiar.

I was a phantom in a glass maze, walking between lives and sodden by both.

I traced the edges to a dry point in the center and glimpsed your name through a chink in the night.

I marked you on my map as true north then, and all I had to do was keep on walking shadow to shadow, puddle to puddle, until I reached your door.

©️ JM Tiffany

The Leopard Queen

I met the Leopard Queen in a sea of faces.

Their dull inebriated eyes reflected the synthetic glory of rock-n-roll lights. They strobed like cop cars in the post-midnight miasma of another new year.

She was majestic. Amazonian. A thing carved by mythic hands from rare materials and draped in the tanned flesh of wildcats.

This place is a jungle, I thought, but not hers, and not mine.

She gave me her number. Lipstick on a piece of cigarette wrapper. Probably just another bookmark. A sweet memory like a faded dream.

Last night, I met the Leopard Queen, and for a brief moment the sea of faces emptied out over the world's edges, into a vast and silent nothing. And she was, and I was, and we were: twin beasts in a garden outside of Time.

We smiled at one another, two sickles reaping an instant of joy.

Then, the lights flashed, the music droned, the swarm buzzed, and I was swallowed up in the sea of faces and drowned in a glass of beer.

© JM Tiffany

Feather

I have become a feather. My edges are fringed. I am full of light and made of promise. I am stupid with hope, there are no darkened spaces here. Fear is dead and falling in slow motion. There is no vague frontier now but Death’s alone.

And even as I’m falling, I may as well be flying. So let the ground rise to meet me,

and kiss me when I go. © JM Tiffany