Metamorphosis

We jumped from the night and
fell into the moon
upside down
in fractured dreams.
He told me
if I could picture it,
I could live it.
Reality is a broad market.

He came with golden eyes,
silver lips, quilted with satin
like the finest-dressed mannequin.
His puppet fingers
dealt a card; a blow, hard.
I wept with despair.
The Lovers, it read,
the world darkening
around his hair.
What does it mean,
I said.

We made love
through the storm,
wrote about it.
Him, a satire.
Me, a poem.
He lit a fire,
but it burned blue.
I waited for him to say
I love you,
but he dressed himself
in frantic black,
walked out,
never came back.
My desperate skin fell off,
stripping like cracked paint;
a whisper, a cough
and I crumbled.
There was a tinge of pain
in every act of sin,
love, lust and shame,
my burden heavy enough
for the two of us
but conveniently made for only one.

I tinkered with the tarot
deck he left behind
for me. Every night,
I unveiled my destiny.
The Tower.
Outside, thunder.
The hour slipped like sand
in a glass timer,
the moon crying into the sea,
dust drying up the sun.
The animals sing songs for me.

Locked into my metamorphosis,
I wait for the card of the Lovers,
burning for my virginal kiss,
clutching at my covers.

I send letters to the rain,
my heart dissolving like a pill
as the flood sends my words
over the hill
and back to my ears.
There are too many years.