Asylum



In the madhouse
on beds of daggers
we slept like crickets
chirping to ourselves
while they tried their best
to make us cannibals.

The nuns were worse than
lawyers, praying like accordions,
tracking their sins into our soft
wax skulls, wheezing like roosters
when one of us cried, laying the greasy ribs
of Jesus on our plates.

They kept you behind
door number six. I'd go to you
with a stolen key, when the noon
smelled bright as carnations,
when the nights were
more purple than the jacarandas.

You spoke of your father
dead of snakebite,
a clockwork marvel with
his million-dollar suit of skin,
of your mother
with the viper between her lips.

I remember your kiss
astringent with reason
as bitter lemons, and the way
your hair blew back from
your dog-brown eyes like poisonous
smoke from the oleanders.

I thought these things
as beautiful as angels
whispering in the dahlias
when I was lost in the asylum,
when the doctors did all they could
to see that we ate each other
down to the bone.


April 2022