Cathedrals

By Lauryn K. Powell

For someone who once built

cathedrals with their lips,

igniting the words like

liquid fire, you made lies

seem like a feather bed that

I was content to

                               lay in.

 

A comfortable continent,

an incompetent love, shoved

under the carpet of falseness

that I soon found to be

darkness, harnessing the

thing I wished not to be:

                                                                                                                                                         You.

 

Though lava fell from your

tongue, the high-strung symphony

sings to me still. The                                                                   echoes

reverberate in my ears, and

the sound of down falling down

ensnares me now.

 

Unfairly, the feather bed said

things in the night I dare not

repeat, sweet lies intertwined

in the pine trees like your

fingers. Your smell, it still

tells me tales from our pillowtalk.

 

I still have your words.

The cathedrals once standing

above the city now loom,

broad stories a chore

to sweep up. I need cheap

absinthe, green grass roots.

 

I pray in the cathedrals from

time to time, from rhythm to rhyme

and shoot-to-kill state of mind. I go to

the altar of the atheist, where feathers

rest like                           whispers on

my shou                          lders.