Bruises in ink
No words to find
Scrawled through the memory
Once belonging to the
Supposed queen of the jungle.
Curlicues and many,
So many lines.
Script in waterfalls
Pouring around her
From all sides.
Who decides
A tiger is a tiger?
That royalty is royalty?
That a girl is a woman?
Who nurtures the thought?
Nourishes the seedling?
Helps her grow?
Who waits?
Lets her catch up…
Lets her fall…
Lets her break…
Lets her weep and weep and weep…
The quill does not wait.
The divine continues to write.
The divine who supposedly
Knows
Why a tiger is a tiger
When a girl becomes a woman
How a queen transcends royalty.
Dreams of an endless maze
Through which her thoughts race
Ants crawling under her rotting skin
As she hides in the underbrush,
To disguise the scent of day-old blood.
Ashtray stains soaking the sheets
Cursed as a daughter, exalted as a mother
Her battle cry whistles
Past chips and tiles
Puncturing holes in the stifling heat
Holes in her cathedral, holy body
Striped in lesions, welts like scars
Whispering faintly
Of ghosts inside her head.
I can’t understand it.
The guttural desire
To want so badly to live
And disappear
At the same exact time.
Shamed by the spirits who swore to save her
Turned their backs on their supposed dearest
Once the source of her greatest strength,
The fault, she thinks, is all her own.
That she has been forsaken
To have to piece the puzzle herself again.
What song will play at her funeral?
When she turns to skeleton
Decaying with the ants
Rotting beneath the surface
Of her damned skin.
She did not choose to be born
A tiger.
Stars are never any help,
To distinguish predator and prey
Their light is too far.
To the divine star,
The tiger and the ant are one
And the same.
Something so small
As the meager ant
Could decompose the ruler of a jungle.
The universe still stands
As the greatest jungle of time.
So why should a tiger
Never be allowed to weep?
Even the Fool
Must stand at the edge
Of the precarious Tower before
She can embody the Star.
Despite the destruction,
The aftermath of her manic,
She keeps
Gouging herself so.
No blood in wounds,
Just gaping blackness
In her space-time plane.
In her torment she lies,
She ridicules the spirits
Ephemeral with wind,
Draining herself dry.
No way to tell
Who she is just yet
The divine voices
Invisible to all but her
Demand ceaselessly
She endure.
I wish I could tell her
If I only knew
When the day would come
For her tiger soul to
Blossom from that
Of a beast
To one of beauty.
The most I can tell her
Is that I’m sure,
It is but a whisper
Straight from the heart.
A breath, I hope,
From her battered lungs
Worn from the smoke she used
To blind her sorrows.
The day to roar
For her to bellow
The songs of the spirits
With the voices she harbored
For them
In the fissures of her mind.
And the resounding tears
Of the weeping tiger
Will nourish the seedlings to come
And her battle cry
Will play at her funeral
As a testament to the divine
That she has endured.
Ellamental Thoughts 