The pill is the objectivity of the mouth
A miracle of modern medicine, we pull ourselves up by our teeth, cherish the red. Tug, quiet & callous, at the dream that sleeps in the sin of despair. A great act of sorrow, having finally won the attendance you finally failed. That will leave us breathless. I make a blue crease, untangle the braids that fray in my hands. A war like a miracle, when they cut me open they found a stone for every one of you. One last, an addiction to losing more than justice.
**
The pills speak
in your living voice. The one that laughs in my arms, buoyant tendril, glancing fissure, dormant prognosis. Metastasize the animal mind where fused— like a joyful trembling against the chest could last, like you could stay alive. Bouncing around the room like we could let ourselves a future other than this, ossified hate, thrown like light from the most unlikely surfaces. Like everything is at once a reflection & illusion of you now that you’re dead now that you’re a pill that croons only in blue now that you belong to a world we can approximate only in song.
**
The blue of the pill is sweeter than the pill itself
Lozenged incisor, wreck the milk of. The woman with your mouth, does she look like you does she know the violet tuning that upends the forest? Forked like a wish, cradled abandon of her arms. She feels you there, shuddered inside her. You are the sweet of the pill that swallows men whole. The clutch of abdomen where once becomes a storm of nevers. Shiver the frost from her breath, a first Christmas. A knife carved of bone is all the hand can hold. Is the hand a bladed fistful bloom?
**
The truth is you ain’t never comin’ back
Because everybody knows the blue of the pill is sweeter than the pill itself. Because you should remember telling me to say yes to life. Because the morning spills across our arms like a battleground. Because how long did you say? Because we are felled. Because you are prone to cirrus now. Say again. Wring the prayer from the strings’ burgeoning fingers until the teeth bloom blood. Sweet when it burns. Because I was a musicless holler, a mountain without cry. A fallow flesh, a formless— no minuet, no gavotte, no smallest blister. Because no barren-throated threat spools night from night to crown you. Because no splintering bramble, caught on loss & dashed against a people nearly bewildered as their days. Say collapse. Because of days I wished I’d cut the chord myself. Because the pill still writes the song that refuses to release you. Because its blue was not enough. Because night will dream where stars are only fissures. Because we plead so far into devastation. Because we find your wreckage in the open mouth of the river, its endless tongues.
**
GREY VILD is a Queer Art Mentorship & Brooklyn Poets fellow & a MFA candidate in poetry at Rutgers University. His work can be found at Them, Vetch, Harriet: The Blog and elsewhere.