Unsolvable

Unsolvable

Long ago, possibly in the late 70s, someone replaced a single piece of this bucolic jigsaw puzzle with one from another box.

This single piece is neither the right size nor the right shape.

Its colors are brighter, and it clearly belongs somewhere else.

The mocking lacuna reminds me suddenly that there are two puzzles that will never be solved.

Each is forever incomplete.

Each puzzle is missing a critical piece belonging to the other, and each piece is somewhere surrounded by others, yet utterly alone.

But then I consider that perhaps these puzzles willingly exchanged parts of themselves.

Conceivably there was an oath, and maybe they were in love.

I ponder how many pieces of myself I have given away and wonder if I, too, am unsolvable.

© JM Tiffany 2024

Gravity

Sick with sadness and wretched with longing, I found you in a night of smoke and poison.

Crooked reptiles leered through alcoholic distortions and I burned myself to check the nightmare for substance.

Twin blue flames cut the haze.

Your gravity drew me closer and, like a star of grace, or a sign of calamity, you cut through the clouds and crashed straight into my heart.

© JM Tiffany

Disremembered

I lay with the lights off and whisper to the Night. “I feel sympathy for monsters,” I say to Her, “Because I know what has made them.” My wounds are invisible in Her darkness, but the cuts and contusions are everywhere. Little valleys and hills, amid coarse patches of lethargy. “Must those broken continue to break?" I cry. She is quiet. The Night is a good listener, yet she never offers me any advice. I bind the cracks with chemicals and sink away, slipping into Her belly to be disremembered until dawn. © JM Tiffany 3.18.2024

Ø₱Ɇ₦ł₦₲ ₮ⱧɆ ɆɎɆ

Her robe falls away in an opalescent swell, collapsing at her feet like a serpent’s skin.

Laced through with eldritch circuitry, her lithe body, niveous and bare, pulses rhythmically with light.

Polychromatic bioluminescence coruscates hypnotically beneath the milky translucence of ivorine flesh, lambent sub-dermal lattices of blushing radiance tracing the interior contours of her being.

Her lucid roseate eyes and glossy pink lips glitter jewel-like, the high cheeks of her delicate visage blush, a pale flower blooming in the brood chamber of the crystalline naos.

She begins to dance, at once lovely and frightening. Graceful and fluid, yet sharp and precise, the air about her whispers secrets with each practiced motion, her slender limbs sighing like swords to her silent song. As exquisite hips sway, shapely legs leap and glide, nimble feet caressing the kaleidoscopic mirror of the quartzite floor. Spine arcing, wild cascades of gossamer hair fall in glowing fiber-optic waves over pallid breasts as she draws unseen signs in the gestural language of a lost world. Spectral and diaphanous, her delicate fingers trace luminous shapes, neon-pink glyphs of molten intent whose fluid forms weave a delicate web of abstract patterns. The cosmos shudders in harmonic resonance, rhythmically entrained with the deep magic of her dance. As worlds align, the veil parts and The Eye is opened. Through it she sees the true shape of all things and goes mad with ecstasy. © JM Tiffany

Time

The heart goes tick-tock with the clock, and time is running out, ticking out gray strands of tangled numbers.

Time closes your eyes and wakes you with a scream, ticking on down the old man’s stream.

Time has no time to love, my dear. Time does not love you. She creases and she wrinkles. Her cold kisses put spiders in your veins.

She boxes up our memories and takes away the days, stealing away the sighs we used to breathe with ease.

She’ll drip the dreams right out of your head!

Hear me, I know! I used to be young! I wore the hats of children and played with tiny hands.

No, Time does not love you, my dear. I know time, and there’s no time like the present you give me. But Time, she will take that too.

She creeps and she crawls too slow to see, but she’s quicker than me, my love, quicker than me.

I’ve stolen from her, and she’s found me out, counting out my days in rays of gray and white.

Time takes you away and never brings you back.

The mirror tells the story. One day, the leaves will fall, and time will teach us all the secrets of the dirt.

No, time does not love you, my dear. But I do love you, in time; until the time is up; until my time is gone; until i am a picture, or a poem, or a phrase.

Though time may not remember, I was with you all those days.

©️ JM Tiffany

Branches 

I remember feeling you  as you drew closer.

You hung above me like a shadow  over the face of the deep.

I could feel your breath  in the valleys of my neck.

What did I smell like? You were like rain.

I remember the moon. It was so bright that I closed my eyes.

I could still see you  with them shut, but memory or silhouette, I did not know.

Kissing you, I pulled you into my wound and like a seed, you grew there until crooked roots and twisted branches  pierced me from within. You wore me like ghastly ribbons, horrible and beautiful, and utterly beyond repair. I clung to you then as I cling to you now, wispy remnants frayed by the wind, a ghost in the forest of your heart.

©️ JM Tiffany 3.18.2024