Trifled
Natalie Gales
Trapped in torrents of you—the hard place
Where I want you on your knees, demanding
Feet tapping in temporal tune, where
I want you tasked with
The descent through the mirrored tower.
Stare back at your face, a false promise of compassion.
Stare back at mine: the angles you scrutinized, the vowels you sabotaged,
Your interest drowning in indifference.
I thought you were different from Narcissus.
A captive capable
Of being locked in conversation with a tongue unlike your own
And still being entranced by each brick laid by my tone,
A tomb’s token tracery.
You have been pardoned, through your protestations,
From my poetry. I refuse to famish my free verse;
Fair is war.
Trapped among framed fractures of yourself,
Lone figure, you could never feel
Your feet pick up pace as my syllables trace
Into you, verbatim,
All that I wish to be known.
Fumbling theories and faked triumphs
Fog your focus,
Force me to fragmentation.
Sarcasm is the devil’s most apt contemplation,
Forsaking thoughts like crypts,
Those which melt by lock picks.
Though there are times in which
All the world lies in suspended glass,
We are free falling through
Sound, silenced:
Glazed in fiction.
Your voice
Fills with favorites, and among them,
I front: a
Felted fantasy, a shadow puppet, a fool.