Vase 2

I am
the arrow shot at your birth.
on the night you suffered through a predestined fever,
With only the sound of time being whittled down,
I covered your softening cough.
Because the sickness lay deeper than skin, I entered your mouth.
Dawn,
though by then, you will have vomited me up.

What you poured out through the night
was a vase shaped like a stomach.
The emptiness that couldn’t be vomited
hung in the void.
The only way to restore your overturned shell
is for any flower to spend
a hundred days inside you.

Who, then,
will be the neighbor to the man who fell among thieves?

You clutched the empty room
and took it into the square.
cherry blossoms that crumble under a mere layer of shadow,
sunflowers with deep roots untouched by dirt,
and
in the busyness of midday,
roses whispering in vivid red,
drawn to the scent of what isn’t in the vase,
were placed in the tension of vibrancy.

You set me in the crack of a window,
unmarked by a trace of light or shadow,
and poured in a substance drawn from a mirage.
The flowers wavered under the directionless beauty,
and amid the drying shadows,
I was tinged in blue.

Picking up fallen petals, we wandered through the homeland of flowers.
The forest we built with our breath
flowed over the paths where the flowers tread.
In the sharp cave,
our smooth faces gazed into each other’s orbits.

As your breath seeped into my face,
the ninety-nine petals began to bloom.
In the deep silence, our story grew lush.
Dawn,
we could finally wither.