Sunflowers In The Attic

sunflowers in the attic

to paint a tomb

in the prose of life

to caress a wound

with the edge of a knife

to write letters to the dead 

in a mosaic of hurt

to start bleeding dread

waiting for an answer 

to appease the thirst

to feel the verse of your lips

follow the prosody of my skin 

to let the streams of your tears

carve pain on the breath of chagrin

why is your name scribbled on a grave?

it channels in the streets of this morbid haze

where I can feel your cold pulse

your screams 

your presence

absence

echo in my veins

sewing a lace insomnia 

dissecting a lacuna 

searching in the emptiness of my heart

until it rips apart

breathe in

breathe out

you have blinded me

from the compass of existence

diagnosed with a troubled

broken 

spilled

pen 

the only solution 

is to burn the paper

burn me

© Margaux Emmanuel

a dreamlike love bite

Two songs

away from you

having lunch

by the car

I close my eyes

memories

of kissing pretty neighbors

in their treehouses

paint dripping

down the easel

of the night

all I wanted

was for love

to bite

and now

you’re smiling

by my side

I guess

I’ll rob the sky of tonight’s stars

for you

but once my eyelids open

I’m still a lovesick kid

in an empty parking lot

and the stars always find

a place to hide.

© Margaux Emmanuel

The champagne lingering in the driveway of his eyelids ransacks the minibar of his depressive tendencies. A suffering insufferable dandy with a corduroy smile spills the cough syrup on the window sill and walks through a non-smoking floor with an unlit cigarette giggling in between his teeth. The stained carpet mutters that he’s a homeless homesick and the tears sticking to the glass table know it already. So he sits back on a fatigued settee and pours himself a dubious drink with a parking lot view. So he sits back uncomfortably with his heart a little tight and he tells himself that it’s just another sick day.

sick days | © Margaux Emmanuel

In the remainder of the tepid alcohol languishing in the flask of your eyes, we drink to the lost silhouette of love, burn our photographs wedged into the yellowed corners of our thoughts. We settle for cemented happiness, contemplating life through its glass corridors where mold is hidden, where I can feel the cracks of our suffering, where I can sense our hands dismembering our own poetry. When empty phrases harrow insomnia, I tape blossoms, breaths of life, to the pages of our unfinished chapters. But the trees’ barks where our initials dangle, imprisoned by a blistering heart, are peeling. I have just realized that flowers wither.

to slip on drunken petals 

© Margaux Emmanuel

Caressing a guitar, a toothpick, whose frail wood had been bitten into far too many times, submerging from between her lips, she tried to capture into the net of melody the feeling of nothingness that crawls into your consciousness when the sun has gone down. With some strands of hair escaping from a tight pony-tail, she slightly hit the instrument’s wooden body, feeling the frustration in her finger tips. She laid the guitar down on the worn carpet, that had suffered too many coffee stains and lied down on her steel-framed bed. The mattress had always been a little too hard. A ray of moonlight escaped from the curtains to obliquely rest on her face. And she sighed.  She could vaguely hear some voices outside. It was too late for them to sneak out of sober lips. She got up and leaned on the windowsill. She noticed a grey car, beaten by time and by carelessness. The headlights almost seemed to be sulking. A smirk etched itself on her face; the loudest voice came from by far the tallest of the three, shirtless, his boney ribs piercing through his pale skin. Their faces and words were a blur. A beer in his unsteady hand, he was leaning against a lamppost and would occasionally burst into a wild laughter. The second one was sitting inside the car, holding a cigarette in between his fingers, the small red fuse floating in the obscurity, the summer night’s breeze slightly pushing the smoke down the block. His legs were dangling out from the leather seats. A Supertramp song was playing on their car’s radio, and he was singing along in an off-key croaky voice, sometimes interrupted by a series of stray giggles. The last one caught her eye. A yellow and white baseball shirt that brought color’s pulse to the shades of the night. Sprawled on the lawn, his slick black wet hair was planted in the grass, his hemmed jeans overgrowing onto the pavement. The darkness wasn’t thick enough to hide his eternal beer-stained grin. She had seen him before. Or maybe she wished to have seen him before. She could imagine the shudder going through her body when he would have taken her by the hand and dragged her through the crowd of a breathless bar. Then, he would have turned around. He would have asked her for a smile. Their glances would have met for a little too long. He would have conjugated her eyes in the language of his soul. It would have been too right. She would have left. Suddenly, she opened the window: “The fuck you think you’re doing? It’s fucking four in the morning for God’s sake!” she screamed. She had her dad’s tongue. Somewhere in those words was hidden, even really well hidden, a hint of playfulness. They all turned around towards her, gawking in surprise. She had her mom’s eyes.

rendez-vous | © Margaux Emmanuel

bittersweet

Swirling in the ashes of honey, I awake crying under a bridge. A blur of roses forcefully blooms in my lips letting faraway delusions plague me in the twilight. When the crepuscule flees while passionately kissing the horizon, when there is nothing to write, nothing right and nothing to feel, where do the lonely petals of sentiment go? The scream of silence reigns, misunderstood. My reflection in a tearful cup of tea has suddenly dulled reality.

© Margaux Emmanuel