Even Trust is Fleeting by Jesse Ogbeide

 

Even Trust is Fleeting 

By Jesse Ogbeide

Mid-July, as I listen to the gentle sound of rain,
I relapse into memory, as a girl begins to tell a story of another man —
how he loves to dance in rose petals,
and adorn his body with paint and jewels,
each time he is in communion with solitude.
Tell me.
Does it break you too?
when secrets you leave on cleaved tongues,
return to remind the body of treason,
frigid and more intense than it once seemed?
Listen,
and you can hear my heart pressed down by sorrow,
you can see how it leaves my body like a fountain — a stone,
unraveling into tears,
and failing to remember that it once had a language.
Outside, I am given a name synonymous to a farce,
and as I walk through the sole path of my home,
I become a lush ground blooming slowly toward sadness,
patient; till I ripen into a strain,
distant from healing.
You may ponder, why I choose to be quiet despite this chaos,
to let grief take me by the wrist and convoy me into oblivion,
I am weary.
Of shaping into faces just to please,
becoming foreign, to the same hands that bring love to the table.
So here; in this delirium,
all I can do is to hope,
that at the end of this wild breaking,
my blood may still be pure enough to season flowers.