I feel it shift inside me,
this wild, furred thing
that has uncurled itself from the
slumberous warmth of my belly
and climbed the rungs of my ribcage
to settle within my chest.
For weeks it has been still,
all flickering eyelids and gentle prodding, but
today its eyes blink wide open, awake-
silvered claws scratch at my skin, an itch like a
hundred-thousand blunt pinpricks from within,
Its steamy breath scorches and sears and
it is burning, burning, burning, breathing out
some exponentially expanding gas giant into my
Ballooning chest, with each heaving pulse
It hisses words into my head
and they swirl there, somewhere above and just
out of reach. It snarls,
and I wrench out the letters
curling round the slippery skin of my soul
And slice up the dim, unexplored corners of my heart
And hook them as bait on my gnarled line of art,
as I fish for the whispers that it chases out of
reach. And when ink is splattered like blood
across the page, and the flesh is spent and the clean sting of fresh paper
has been long forgotten, still it howls
and slashes at my lungs
Until I am drowning and it is laughing in long, stuttered creaks,
Until that dark liquid sloshes and spills over,
sliding into purple veins that
spider across my hands and press the
bristles of a brush across paper
Until I print the sky and the sun and my rumpled bedspread
and pillows, and the dreams they catch, and my books and
my boots and my musings in the shower and the dust on my windowsill
and everything in between- Until every sense is purged
And bled dry- Until my head has been cracked
Open and spilt in acrylics and sweeping strokes
And the colour seeped out of experience and into ink
and then, and only then, does it sleep.
Rachel Deyis is an 18 year old high school student, currently drowning in her A-level coursework. She was awarded the first place for the Taleem Poetry Award, and when she isn’t reading brain-cell murdering romance novels, she enjoys the works of Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Holt and Neil Gaiman.
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