Early Morning Self Portrait
Poem
The smoke flows out
From between my teeth
Like green wind
And ash scatters in the smile.
The smoke is sucked sharply back
With a pain that I love and hate
All at once,
Stirring every hair on my body
Intoxicating my imagination
With clouds of delight
And an abstract vision fills my sight:
I had dreamt in red:
My nose was bleeding
A pool of blood soaking
Into the white dress.
I stare into the scene,
I look at the girl.
The burns stain her fingers
And she spins like a whirligig angel
Under the light
Like a moth hurtling
Towards the flame;
Blissful in ignorance.
In this still quiet moment I have for myself
I watch a single candle glowing in the snow,
And I still prefer the sensation of a pen
To the clicking of keyboard keys.
And it becomes a fever:
I am obsessed with this need.
I still turn to my old music for my comfort;
That glowing safe place inside my head;
My days are reduced to vegetables and bread.
Where is the gravy?
I see myself in the face of a mirror
Thousands of luminous reflected eyes
All belonging to nobody but me,
And all staring back at me like someone else.
Each moment hangs by itself
Suspended in a calm haze;
The beams of shade go sprawling across the floor
Time keeps slipping away.
buy Lëaf Ednïwinga’s book on amazon: Em: A Picture-Book Fable
more by Lëaf Ednïwinga
photograph by Stephen Di Donato
