By Louis Meeks
My leather arms they hold you like poison oaks,
A broken wheeze of branches
I’ll hold you there, against that black door on the yellow road,
Just in sight of a listing scythe, Marked tightly to brushes of throaty wind.
My fingers strum the splinters, the shoots and wrinkles of old hands,
plastered, they shift along fading smiles,
The globe of hot light ring from cheek to eye,
Pouring deep pools of spiders through fingers, springing and winding, sprinting from us to the amber barley.
The fields cut the road, a deep groove into the stone of landscape,
It swings, the bloating wisps convex and sink, its twitchy strums rudding onto the grounds of oily tarmac, spiking around us like a wet fire.
The door stands strong in its rigor mortis, the slivers of brazened varnish pressed impression into my back,
A faint dip nested in my wired hair, where whispers of its name fall beside the wisp, wrapped and zipped in from the ring of winds,
The voice of the door muffled in folds of grasping arms,
Sidled between me and the scream of light trailing deep red, that whipped crack in the horizon,
Cushioning the door in its final pour of platinum quilt, whisking round the golden fields in the sinew’s glow.
I hold you there, planted into the fray, a prism in the crunch of desire,
I’ll fester there, in navy grey skin, in peels of memory, cast in shadows and stretched in shallow dents of my frame,
Scrunched and welded the screws of my brow, just cresting the pearl of eye, Creeping out to catch the final cast of earthly light, a twinkled tear screeching from the wind to the creek of the door where the monsters dwindle,
The night’s flag rattles against the still of the barley, whence the wind left with the day, the crackled mulch torn with the knife of the horse,
The knight’s horn cackles, presiding deeply into the road as the gold seeps into dark,
Leaving a glint of Its scolded armour, the spiked wilts of ashened steel pricked and twisted as It casts off Its horse, as still as a tower in the coarse heat of the twilight,
That great horn steams from Its taloned fingers, the tube funnelled deep into the basin of its helm, coursing flumes of thick calls to the nothing and to me.
As long as I hold you there, you’ll be spared, and swings open the door, brushed free of its dormant life to the scape of the dark,
The last bead of mine eye sealed in the drop of the horizon, slipping down and shifting into the road, like smashed glass carried from stream to ocean, like steam whipped into air,
The fall of the door, Just the splitting pump of the knights call,
The thick tune becomes the wet gel around me, encased in my iron lung, bled off all my colour and gaul,
Yearning for Its vices, hurling in queues of monsters, hurting me with ill will and witched blare,
It’s burned organs twirl drill bits in ears and coil the ooze of brain, wheeling around thin looms, the white of my fear,
And I’m unravelled in indifference, now I’m in metal and disrepair,
And my bead of light extinguished as I see you are not there.
