The Almost Butterfly - Mehar Haleem

Emerald sheets.
Delicate emerald sheets festooned with podgy ivory strings.
Strings
a bit too moving;
a bit too alive.
Emerald sheets lined with intricate hole-made-designs,
delicate green nets put in the sea, to engulf the life out of the barely alive.

The buffet spread lies open like
a broke brothel in the dead of the night, inviting only the doomed;
consuming only the already dead.

The nightmare is the last thought that crosses our beastly brains.

Snatched in the very nadir of our cocooned slumber,
sleeping on dreams of a fearless flight,
made by colored kites in cloudless skies.

Kites without strings; kites with wings.

Lifeless kites moored by reels of silk.
Carcasses of dreams
of what was
and what could have been
if not for the reels
of silk, like the wheels
of Satan’s carriage,
fastening the wings, drowned wet wings.
Reels
rotating fluidly, consuming a dream.
Knot by knot.
Forcibly plundering innocence.
Thrust by thrust.

The inevitable pendulum dangling over our repulsive heads, comes to a still; a strikingly silent still.

The tumult is over; the silhouettes of jewel-toned fabric await us.
Dreams of flying
tethered by hot boiling water. Boiling water
a bit too moving
a bit too alive.