As You Sleep

As you sleep, stars land on your eyelids and angels touch your lips.
As you sleep, the moon descends from her high perch to kiss your brow, her fair face peaceful.
But you wake—
you wake, and the world cries out in fear.
You wake, and you blast the moon to her place again,
where she weeps the stars on a diamond sky of pain
where she becomes a bloody shadow of dusk.
But you don’t care.
You hit her, again and again,
until the craters in her face are pockmarked with sorrow,
until she fades away into eternity,
until there’s nothing left but a tear-stained brocade of sequined agony.
Then the sun rises
and graces your fair cheek with a Midas touch,
but you grab his golden arm and shatter it
so the rubies fall like daggers and knife a helpless soul.
And through all your pain,
your heart and your head are in perfect alignment:
you pick up the gun and pull the trigger,
not caring who or what you shoot,
not knowing what lives are broken, shattered, destroyed—
You just shoot.
Again
and again
and again.
I’ve been the victim of your gun so many times,
but now I will give to you a tribute of cannons
whose shells will crumble to dust at my feet
but whose glorious fireworks will join the moon in her feast of sorrow—
because I know
you won’t last long.
You’ll burn out soon enough—
not soon enough for those ruby-studded tears and diamond crowns of hatred—
but you’ll burn out until you’re nothing but a shell
ready to crumble like dust at my feet,
a cannonball shot and emptied of its fire,
a bullet casing ringing with the hollow echoes of screams.
And maybe then, you’ll be empty enough
and dead enough
for me to pour in some healing elixir of peace,
and I will patch up the bullet holes from all those guns—yours included—
and bandage the wounds with a salve of love.
Maybe then, you’ll listen.
Maybe then, you’ll hear.
Maybe then, you’ll wake when the moon, cratered with your hatred, kisses you—
and maybe
maybe you’ll kiss her back.

© copyright by Isabelle Lahaie, 2009