My game.
And cards flick over revealing
their faces in honest, bare objectivity.
Naked fingers cold, curling unstained,
digits free of another’s untamed
scent that’s faded like damp sweat,
like dew under a mournful sun at noon,
grip the sim stiff objects of my attention.
There’s time wasted,
time drawn from my liver
by time’s long bow scraping the strings
of my deep despair as I borrow
a card from the fatigue blunted,
faceless pack as the hot and cold
colours fill the atmosphere
I fear:
a picture,
an image of life,
my life, etched on laminated paper.
The King of diamonds, full of life,
full of riches, a rotundity of joviality,
my mirror image, my antipathy.
A Jack, any Jack from the blessed pack
is the jack of all trades, but never the master.
His efforts to please turn to appease
the desires of the faithless harem.
The Queen of Hearts who holds all the cards
in her sweet clammy hands sings softly
from bright eyes whose vivacity
resides at the other end of Her suit.
The Ace of Spades, the loneliest of the lonely,
the card singled out as singular, the one,
the only, the decidedly lonely, defiantly alone.
Pick a card, any card, and lay it with its fallen
fellows and I will show you the length of my time
here in my space, my void and my fortitude.
I play the game, and play on alone in the deep black of night
with the curl and twist of a club or a spade dreaming
of diamond eyes,
and a warm, beating heart.
Malek Montag,
Rochester, 2017
Picture Credit: from, http://3.bp.blogspot.com/ (My edit for mood)
malekmontag 