Title: Bonedust Tongue
Author: Patricia Cram

Temptress circling like a vulture,
entering oblivion's light
while tasting of the sea.
A single volume would strain to hold
the entirety of her gypsy tongue
arriving just to leave again,
taking your skin into
the abysmal realms.

Fatal words once uttered
ascend the dead tree
and rest on the wings of vultures,
carried past ruins and mountains
to find their resting place
among things lost or forgotten.
But in the one desert and in the one sea,
the spine of the aether does ascend.
A flick of her tongue
casts shadows where her
sleeping loves do lie.

Let things fade again,
the serpent quietly swallows its tail
and lies down for a spell.
Consume and hide,
feed and disappear.
I must find what is left behind
and let it sleep like death.
Let the serpents breathe and dream,
and quietly recede.

Orchids crawling black up the spine,
feeding on emptiness,
leaving a trail of blooms,
the unrepentant serpent
fighting gravity and blossoming
where it will.
Unforgiving thorns and mire,
the air is choking on
the wine of their mouths,
the promise of some elusive forever
that wounds by its very existence.
Put your illusions
where I won't find them
because my book
unfolds in aether
unfurls with scars
kept from you, my loves.

We become the keepers
of dread and desire alike;
all my potions are running out
and I'm collecting ruins and will
for the next batch of venom
that will spill from my mouth
and into theirs.
You knew how to keep me for
hours untold
but forever is a different kind
of ritual, a spell unwritten,
a thread lingering long and red.
My intestines climb
the tree of knowledge
slippery and bloody,
the instinct ascends.

Three open eyes on my face
the void, the pulse, the din
that impale
that rise like spines and
smoke and spiral staircases
from my palms.

I want to fall in love
with the way a library is arranged,
with the fingerbones pointing to a word.
I'd wade through
an inferno of books
to reach the word
entangled and adorned
scribed in a ritual
of history and spilled blood.
We'd lie against the curve of a letter,
dream within the ink,
filling empty spaces with lust,
imbuing the aetheric text
with the serpents of our tongues.
The language of the gaze
the silent miasma of time.
Gravity, a book of the heart, seeping blood.

Smoke and toil and coils come undone
and the moon is waning, the sunrise
is near, and I've whispered the world
while you were away and the
saints and the heretics all passed
through here and the night wasn't
long enough for the unearthing
of all the bones, but wander,
and speak, and become – chaos is
sister and spine – the ancient ones
never left this land and the dirt
covering their faces is riddled
with roses and thorns; the
flesh weeps in chambers locked away,
and time feeds on kisses and
voices muttering names.

The torment of dreams digging deep,
of hours away from seduction,
of voices drowned out by static.
Hunters and predators all.
I'll read the alignment of stars
behind your head,
and turn my gaze aside
when the windswept wild
lays bare the wilderness
of the unexplored.
I'll paint the gateway
with curses hot and thighs cut open.
Ashes blowing in my face.

My rise and fall of water
turning black, of burning bright
in a night so long it kills.

Requiems of bone-shattering noise.
My flesh moves to the
grinding of teeth and the low din.

Therefore you are endless
therefore you are as we have never been.
And so you are endless
for I dream of you without end.
“That which keeps me from dying
is killing me.”
A snaking tongue with neither
end nor beginning
do unto me with your vicious ways
and I'll reach in and break your ribs
one at a time,
remedying the maelstrom with breath hard
and your wall of sighs
does bleed onyx-thick
with stars blown out, the abysmal kiss
so unfaded by fingers rubbing raw
a broken stem, an opiate
taking the shape of your
neck beneath my lips.
Salome of nowhere, your seven veils
must fall, abyss-ward, skyward,
and leave you pure and raw.

© Patricia Cram and VIALATIONS 2007