________________________________________________________________________________

Like a serpentine cloud from the ashy caverns of the
    crematorium
Your laments wend their way in,
Tickling my ears with their diphthongs and
    rosemary-scented resonance
Yours is an aesthetic endeavor
Like dandelion baubles, like a metaphysical
    blueberry
But your syllables of criticism manipulate
me out of this statuesque asylum
into a tangible tumultuous shroud of steel and nettles
burnished by twilight and dripping with rhetorical
    remembrance.
Standing at the threshold, the bellicose button of my
    heart devours
your lifeless silhouette like an allegorical hiccup.
My mourning seems irrational in the face of this
    melancholy asphyxiation,
and my anecdotes seem to hang like placid
    soliloquies on my tongue,
waiting for a moment when some chaotic Bolshevik
    maelstrom
will allow for symbiotic serendipity as the hierarchy
    of morbidity begins to collapse.
If I had my druthers, I’d wait for that pearlescent
    synthesis of your words
when the promises, like opulent tapioca pearls drip
    through the splendor of your anachronistic
    declarations.

But hysteria, like cumulus clouds coagulates,
    eradicates all sense, all hope of symmetry.
How like a mistress, these expectations tease me away
    with promiscuous whispers
Of some omnium gatherum of monkeys and elephants, turtles and squirrels
A veritable circus of seductive promises.
So intoxicating is your lithium grandeur,
That I, like a metronome, fall in sync to the
    tintinnabulation,
Never suspecting that your lyrical bubble may burst.

________________________________________________________________________________

Hollyanna McCollom is a Portland-based freelance writer and the editor of PDX Magazine. A mother of two, Hollyanna is thrilled to have passed her passion for art and words on to her otherwise rambunctious, sword-obsessed boys, Brady and Parker (because the pen is still mightier, naturally!)