Reliquary

This is a repost

This was first shared on

Aimee

’s

walk in the dark

, then removed and published by

Black Coffee Creative

. I’m reposting here purely because I don’t know another way to import it into the

Matters of Substance

poetry section.

Reliquary

I write this with hands in withdrawal,
knuckles cracking in the cold dawn.
It still lingers at the edge of my breath
like the aftertaste of a summer storm.

It was the silver that mapped my nights,
the flicker behind my eyelids,
the hymn I followed through corridors
paved in midnight promises.
It sang me awake.
It sang me apart.

Now morning fractures, glass underfoot.
No surge to greet the veins,
no bright river running through my mind.
Just the hunger that won’t let me die
but refuses to let me live.

I wander these rooms echoing with absence,
joy sealed in jars I cannot open,
inspiration buried beneath old newspapers.
Hours split and drift

My mind flashes—wires crossed,
tiny currents sparking;
and I long for oblivion,
or silence,
or needle’s kiss.

It was my patron of impossible awakenings.
The world tastes of cardboard,
colours starve in my mouth.
I am a reliquary clattering with spent prayers,
a vessel abandoned by its ghost.

What remains is the outline of what I was
wandering the wreckage of what I became,
aching for a song,
aching for an end,
aching
for the drug.

⛧ ❤︎ ⚸

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