Kafka’s Forbidden Poems III

A world to lay her desire bare,
    to condemn it
    in order to claim the soul,
    to defy her:
           no touch,
           no surrender,
           not to unmake the bed,
           but the mind;
       both undone
       at the mercy of time.
The flowers bloomed,
    every one of them,
    and yet
    she wanted my words
    to die in my mouth.

A violet promise:
     two seas and one scarlet star;
     two colds with garnet texture;
     the hue of innocence, once undressed;
     a petaled violet, bitten-sweet with perfume;
     the nature of the end of time
     revealed against its own beginning.

Mind-rain between the sheets,
sky unmade beneath her skin
under the hand that tames the rose
                                            into thorn,
the cut that remakes your world.

Inside lies what disarms your voice:
    the water is neither violet nor pink,
       you, feeling its way, touching;
       you, feeling around, trying;
       but it presses your silhouette
       to the brink of what you can feel
       [coming… or] already here?
Kafka’s Forbidden Poems III ·