Skin

The bell-boy stepped into my rented room

of elbow-brushed windows and I asked him,

Why does this hotel

smell of sunlight

so soon?

He pointed to a painting.

He said he knew.

So the rumours

of our sweat still remain,

clinging to the silvered frame

hung on this wall,

and the canvas feels like

a second skin,

Skin, I said, that was caught

on the corner of your bed,

old lover.

Skin, I repeated, that was

no longer fresh,

and I surely left it behind.

Yes,

I have seen your nakedness before,

and today once more

I feel it in these disturbed colours,

but who stands hidden

in the corner of the painting

possibly reciting songs from memory

to the red sparse tree, and making

the world believe that he

loves and exists

like the poor light

filtering in and drawing his shadow.

(He cannot be you,

because you believed in night

and miracles, only,

and your tinted glasses changed

the way you looked

at the world and me.)

And while I lean through

the frame, trying to

paralyse the night sky,

letting down my hair

like a shadow

of some fairytale,

for you,

my grey lover,

asking you to climb out over the edge

your smell stalks away into

the chalk-laden streets

far, far away from this painting

while your old whisper rings,

Girl, you said, make me violet,

like the sky in your pocket

and I will be your poem in death.

Then the bell-boy murmured

that he knew all about poetry

and he granted me

deliverance, suddenly.

I’ll take you, he said, to Bluebeard’s Room

if only you could pledge

to set free the demon of scents.

But I could only promise him

my name.

He must have agreed for soon

I let his steps roam,

as freely as his voice

till I entered the room

of blueprints and bones.

Silently,

the sea seeped in through the floor,

you crept in too, dusting chalk dust

from your clothes.

And I knew you wanted a reward

for your presence.

As the music ceased in your boundary

of blue walls, I lie down again

for I have transgressed,

and my slashed wrist must feed

the dried blood on your sheets.

Lover, I said, you must know

my skin is scarred now

and I cannot leave it behind.