At one point,

I was a basin,

carved from stone and molten steel,

covered in ash.

And rain slipped in,

mixing in with the soot and dirt,

all over my cracking skin.

I became a canvas.

And then you came along.

With your brushes and pens.

Writing it all off,

like it maybe meant something.

But you spoke in softer syllables

than all the storms before.

Your quiet little whispers

fired off like gunshots in my ears.

Cataclysmic events,

that cracked the basin in half,

rattled inside my skull,

like trench fire.

Somewhere between the end,

the hollow bullets that conclude,

and the falsified beginnings,

the ones I wrote about in dreams,

you slipped in,

and spilt your paint all over me,

running away the soot and ash,

the stones and molten steel.

Iron

I watch your green leaves

go to war against the dead trees

that tower over you.

Burning like words tattooed

on my dried and dying skin,

you let ashes consume your roots.

You weren't made for this.

But somehow, you clad yourself

in charcoal and iron,

paint and plaster,

and cut armor out of the stars

and you ran, headfirst,

into the gunfire and smoke.

Between the ringing shots,

I watch you smile,

the way the ocean smiles

to the sun in the evening.

Your eyes swallow darkness

like your spent cigarette butts

that light the asphalt at your feet,

mixed in with empty casings

in the shallow pools spilled around us.

And I feel like burning this house down

so the smoke will tell me something

to whisper to you tomorrow.

I want to taste lead and iron,

plaster and concrete,

just so I learn to speak to you

amid cannon fire and roaring chaos.

I go to war, wielding nothing,

watching the way you cut up the sky,

the cemetery,

the dead tress that surround you.

I go to war, wielding everything,

and burn out the death that speaks to me

in the all the haunted dreams

you tell me to leave behind.