Creative Voices

By Sufiyan Salman | Edited by Indea Windust

Dust-birthing constellations between the crevices of kitchen cabinets  

Moonlight paints lunar lunacies on blank canvasses of hardwood floors  

Saccharine silence sinks into safe havens of carpeted solace  

I can see your silhouette staining the hallway outside our bedroom door  

The wooden tiles moan in murderous agony with each of your villainous steps  

And my peripheries darken and facades of oblivions cascade before my eyes  

Your lips scar the swollen magentas on the lacerated skin of my back  

Your talons trace cursed incantations down the tombstone of my spine  

I can feel your breath scalding the ashen embers of my faithless religions  

I can feel your hands pushing up my shirt until your face rests against my bareness  

Callous kisses that carve cobblestones into causeways of my cardinal heart  

Nails that engrave their dominion into the lacerations of my meandering soul  

You pull my shirt off my head and toss it into the abyss caving the bedroom floor  

And I become your whorish vulgarities spread across an altar of your carnal desire  

I hold my breath so that I stop breathing and breaking and believing and breathing  

I close my eyes for this sacrifice of my body to disintegrate into the reveries of infernal limbos You unbutton my pants,  

Your thumb edging under the waistband of my underwear  

And I am forgotten, a lost rhythmical relic wistfully whispered away into pacifying pandemonium  

My clothes are crucifixes of my eternal damnation; nooses around my tied redemptive ankles  

And I am naked; I am barren, I am prey, I am damned, I am yours  

Rust corrodes my lips;  

Fragmentations of cacophonous grief that settles into the claustrophobic air  

Tendrils of my hair drip like blackened soot into the carnage of the pillows beneath me  

You are on top of me;  

Skin burnt and set aflame to the candle-lit fuses of your venomous wants inside me  

My soul’s sinews snap into the hallowed hoaxes of my reverent religion  

The cavity of my heart raptures into the melancholia that transgresses behind your ivory irises

You look at my blank stare into the kingdoms of eternal nihility; you stop,  

and you ask me if I want to go on  

I nod my head, ‘yes’  

And your cynical slithers hesitate before they suffocate me again  

You are still eyeing my face for ghosts of any emotions that affirm I am human  

So I smile until my teeth reign over demonic dwindles of deadness that diesels my lips

You pause and sigh with sadness;  

Heartbroken defeat eclipsed in the blues of your water-coloured eyes  

‘I love you’  

You whisper as your words betray your truth with their sardonic lies  

‘I love you too’  

I whisper back as you thrust into the divine debris of my soul and destroy me again

Behind the scintillating sadistic halo above your head,  

I can see the ceiling fan exiling itself into the vindicative whimsical vertigoes above.  

We are the melancholia that taints the purity in the canopies of the highest heavens above  

A portrait of puppets, dead and gone, prey to the cataclysmic carnivores of our deceptive candour  

A landscape of eternal anarchist rhythm, a parody of relentlessly infinite dimensionless suicides  

Your gasp guillotines my face as our bodies become moulds of each other;  

An asphyxiating statue of a full stop punctuating the bylines of our forever lives.  

You fall back into the lamenting linens beside me  

And we stare into the fractured facades drawn in the peeling paints of the septic ceiling  

And if I listen close enough, I think I can almost hear you crying  

But I lie still, waiting to be damned again for the satisfaction of my masochistic melodrama

And I wait for my god to hate me and destroy me again,  

‘Oh, my love, what have we done to each other?’  

---