Magenta Silk
Elki Gillen-Turner
A red drummed against
wooden floorboards.
The
squelch of torn tendons softens my step.
They´re aching
under my feet. there are
dead bodies scattered
everywhere. Sweat of rage has
no grace from a deity
of a swollen sun.
swallow faces curl
into the clouds.
A yellow
tassel
hangs from the floating
palanquin.
Magenta silk flails
from the outskirts of his throne.
A conjuring Silk Road sticks her tongue out.
Cold-
blooded as she is a viper
Faraway—I´m closer to a seat
of white hay.
Guards
drag me from the awning of
wealth
to a vassal state,
from its courtyard to its deathbed.
My boots
scuff on grains of oscillating light, glinting
from
the points on their swords.
Monsters of sun-soaked beads
and tea leaf pearls
twinkle
at the edge of my ear
The wooly plumage of
my bundled blankets,
gone to the
dusk of lilac.
A colour of today
bloodies the air in my lungs.
Now I see,
My father and his country are chained to the wall.
I went with the fall—to
my knees
at the sight.
blood-tempted beasts
had
gouged
his tongue
his eyes
his ears
His sound.
dusted
flecks of
fractural and
ornate memories.
Bandages wrung his blood
like painted fire.
Rubies curled
into
the open sockets of his eyes
Swollen wrists from metal shackles and a smell of rotting
I could only
desperately
identify myself with the scar on my forearm.
Red draped
over
the soot of his burnt tears.
Against
soft petals of
the wilting sun,
his
body was starting to fail.
He was contorting,
into night´s shade.
Moonlight spun
a web around
my escape
to the stars
in my next life,
I can only pray to the daphnes of spring. Shifting the marred hay under
me, I nestle the yellow around my father´s body.
Cacooning
him in
what was left of us.
Before
they set our prison cell on fire
I screamed ´FIRE, FIRE´
and got the silence of everything.
Magenta silk flails around me,
wrapping me
in this room.
I burn alive.
in coldness,
a heart sits next
to me on
that
white seat.