Dasha Kelly
Split me open
Cracked wide my carriage and emptied me out
I should've seen the brute tools you held behind your back
Behind your back
I wanted to be the first person who ever truly had your back
Add my sturdy to your style
My steel to your spine
But you were not constructed for standing tall
Not reinforced with hard metals and gleam
Not engineered for holding on tightly with all your might
You were not made to love me
I chose to love you anyway
Love you like a commission
Like a calling
Like a crush of collapsing stone
I filled you with my perfumes and champagne
My shadows and charades
With stage lights, jet fuel, cabaret smoke and fame
I wedged you through the doors of my world in exchange
for your devotion, your affection and a new accessory for my last name
You split me open
I tried to lavish you unbroken
Love you into one piece
You blew the dust from my empty cavern
Let me seal my longing around your need
We were supposed to defy odds and fate
Endure the snapping bite of truth
Delusion exploded combustible proof how
Your hunger raged more violently than my will
My pride snarled more viciously than your pain
We dotted love arsenic along the dry fabric of our tongues
I let you split me open
Watched you slowly pull the cords of my
tangled and clotted insides
Laid out my ugly for all the world to see
All the rot I'd tried to cure by clutching the velvet edges of you
You looked like a prayer in brown skin
Felt like rapture beneath my hands
Beneath my hands
I only wanted to hold you, like a charm,
beneath the soft curves of my hand
I only wanted to conjure us a miracle with my hands
Instead, you split me open
Excited a feverish weed
Invasive at the roots
Organic matter of you pushed through the concrete slabs of my resolve
You split me wide open
We. Split. Open.
Unstitched these weakened seams
We uncloaked our souls
Exposed our underbellies, raw and seeping
with wounds we suffered but never got around to treating
before finding each other
before clutching at this nothing
before spreading ourselves across a canyon of chronic ache and wanting
We kept dressing our desires in fresh air and failure,
hard times and humility and
eventually
the gracious passing of time
Passing of time
Passing. Time.
We split time between living and haunting
hating and longing
Could’ve been our mortal hearts
or the ancient anguish of our demons, but
we pried wide this fissure
We broke open this sky
In time, I solved the jumbled puzzle of your time with this world,
on this plane, in my life
I finally glimpsed our narrow beam of sunshine
And it was good and clean and honest and pure and
eternal
This love
is eternal
Toxic to our flesh
Redemptive to our spirits
Now we lay to rest our shredded armor
Bask in the glory we could not pin between our palms
Open
Open
You split my love forever open
