REGRET

I
And what are you all looking at
And waiting for?
You ought to pull off
The great over-coat of your masks!
Let every man plant a kiss
Into the soul of the other
Under the naked night skies!

You girls whose bodies speak through wood
You must know that the desert speaks through you
You must know that your artifice
Won’t draw a tear from soil
You ought to be eating men
Like you eat your shame every breakfast time.
Along the long desert of your body
I see a dark lost goat prowling
You must know that you would be free
When you weep by the trees of darkness!

O do come now
Come and see my heart
It’s a smooth length of wood
And you can lie there
Amid the clement sunshine
I am the camera
That lets you do your will
I am the acolyte
That frees you from the burden of confessions
And O you must know
The power over malice
When you roll upon this length of wood
Basking in the sunshine!

If you must reach
The highest branch of heart and flesh
Then you must roll
To the end of this tundra
Drawing your subsistence
From the seasons of the sun
Drifting fast above you:

For twenty-one years
Dark vagueness
You must endure
The flesh of coarse men
Absent-mindedly:
In the chimeras
I see you rolling
In the eternity
Of the body’s free-will
O you must wake up
To the sunshine
And drive your goat
You must acknowledge
Every tear dropped
Over you.

If you’ve ever trod
Through an eternity of sharp tears
If you’ve ever bled
Without really knowing why
Then you would smile
At the mystery behind faceless passion.

Now that you have
So many dances for one son
Your night-table shall have
Only you to dine there
By candle-light
Amid a colony of moths
And you shall file your finger-nails
With waves of sighs
And with beauty
As an inconstant ocean.

I see your form eating into the horizons
Winds of light being seduced
I see you being spirited away by dance
And I’m left trying
To shut the gates of my heart
Above darkening skies
So that when you return
You will see a strong smile
Upon the misty gates.

Can you hear the weeping?
A rigid man is driving nails
Into a grave with a heart
That is far from shrunken:
Can you see the sparkle
Of metal in the liquid agony
As I prepare to spend
Days of years carving stone
From centuries of bloodied floods.

All of a sudden you feel
Skeletal hands wanting to hold
Themselves within the ache of your breast
You sense them attempting to defy sunshine
And a past of needless tears…

II
There is a clear and fickle water
Just behind this breast-bone
That is always breaking forth
As shamelessly as sunshine
That water I must find
A dark clothed lid for…

The answer suddenly lacerates
Like a strike of pain
In the middle of a brewing storm
Two dark iron fore-arms
Make a show of teeth
Between your weakening breast
As you try to draw both halves
Of the romantic cleavage to a close…

See the bulge in my breast
Straining to kiss stone like a muscle
You haven’t said what name
Your water is called
Nor how you pacify
The demons in them
But I’d like it when
You can draw a smile
From bleeding fish
When your dark suddenly turns to light!

And all your organs
You’ve put out to dry
And be deadened
A wire string to wring them out
And yet your feet
Which you had secured against flight
Float high up to meet
Those lost and singing spirits

One day you shall have to take
Your most angelic child
Into a country of marble
And with a condensed heart
You shall slaughter him
For the sake of reason
And that night
All the poetry in you
Shall make us drunk
And henceforth
Your monuments of words
Shall debase passion with symmetry.

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(c) Sanya Osha