Mattress Crucifixion

I care excessively. I care for meanings behind slight expressions, I care about language and how the words seem to recall the taste of sweet bakhlava as it melts on the core of my tongue; ever meticulous of the ratio of vowels to consonants; ever cautious of eyes that ravage hungrily in search of desire. I care about hinges of books and offer compensation to accidental paper tears. I care about the golden hue of sunsets dancing on glass window panes, the way it prods the edges of my lips into a smile on my way home. Home-— I care about home, and family, of relatives I've met only on the occasion of travels and whom after promising to keep in contact, I've let down. I care about strays and tightly chained horses, of squirrels that go days unfed, of people whom my short memory has wistfully forgotten. Of this, and so much more.

And so, I go to sleep every night, surrendered, my arms pinned by my sides, crucified on the cross of my mattress, vaguely aware that my caring has always been internal. 

My inevitable death will have the mantra of "overburdened" written on my gravestone; told to the nosy neighbors who's only ideal is knowing, sung to children I never bore. A caution; a reprimand to those who play on the brink of lending a hand, or turning a blind eye.

Woe Is Me

Dear, dear self,

I am well aware of the comfort of your current state this well into the night. But, allow me to write in this moonlight before it shifts. I have been burdened. And to sleep upon the plush of quilted pillows, wrapped in silk and cotton, when I, your heart am here, wailing in agony, silently thumping against your chest, in desperate plea of your arousal. Self, do you not deem this an injustice?

My strings have gone stale and the specks on me have darkened and dimmed my sight. I pine for mirages, so seemingly short in hopes, an arms-length away..

Then, again, when one lusts for the farthest of galaxies and falls upon the divinest star closest to earth, his heart is nothing but a carcass, a shattered shard of living room wall art. Nothing, but crumbled and defeated.

I desire nothing but the wetness of your tongue with His name. Nothing but, that your eyes, had they glanced upwards to marvel in the lowest of the seven skies, except that they return thankful in His provision. Had you turned the knob of any door, clasped the handle of any gate, would you remember to proceed in His name?

Self, I implore your mercy. I am stricken with self-pity, that I, your heart cannot escape the bounds that have come to be your ribs and my prison.

I love you very much so, yet my fear for you on the Day when I speak against you equates, if not subdues,  my endearment for you, oh, my self.

My Lord! Woe to me!
Woe is me.

July's Tempest

I'd been acquainted with a lovely girl, whose eyes served as the means of replenishment for every man who was stricken with the worst of God's thirst. Kneeling, where we'd met, I held my palms out for her tears. For I, was a woman, in urgent need of water.

Every tale of woe is best accompanied by July's tempest. Amid it all, on the steps of the shelter, we remained, filling the hollows of our hearts, and innards of voids we knew not about.

Alas, desiring the warmth of the furnace, I rose. Immediately I was brought to halt by a hand over mine and a voice nearest to my ear, "an angel sent from above, you are."

"Oh, dear. I am most certain, had you been in the soles of these shoes I bear, you would have acted in a manner far more noble than I."

"No one has ever held me like you have. In your absence, I fear my flesh will recognize the skin it embodies no longer. I am in despair and I know not where I will be in state and mind after your departure."

A glance at the light-streaming corridor and another in the eyes of the grief-stricken damsel. And then, "Do you wish for me to stay?"

She cast away her tears, and faced the direction in which I stood holding the hem of my dress above the point of my ankles, so as for it not to be drenched in rainwater. She cast away her tears and faced me with a stony countenance. "I wish not to burden you."

"Then burden me not."

Even now, the wind whistles her name. To drive me beyond sanity, or to taunt, I know not. I know not of her name, nor the being existing behind the title I obligingly carry.

Each cockcrow since, I have searched all but every horizon the sun ascends from. And how mystical is the work of God that my fate, presumingly, lies when rays shine forth from the West.