Open Hearted

I open my heart, open my eyes, in the drowsy dirty morning. It's Thursday. The light makes a triptych of foxed mirrors on the wall. Look away, should they crack that will be your fortune told. And say you will be mine, beats my heart. There is no ending to its pleading. As always, it grasps what I fail to understand.
Open my heart, open my eyes. Friday. The day opens to a curtain of rain. And say you will be mine. Say you, baker, will be mine. Say you will make me rise like dough under your hands.
Saturday dawns. I open my heart, open my eyes. Let the light in through the crack beneath my bruises. Blood darkens the beginning. And say you, sleuth, will be mine. Discover my liaisons. Note my shortcomings. A taxi rolls discreetly down the rain-freckled road.
On Sunday it is open sesame, open all hours, open season: we go to a Church strung with tangerine silks. A dwarf is playing hymns on a piccolo. Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.
At home the world is beyond sense. The red mullet guts the cat, the goldfish eats my cheese rolls, dogs knock up goat goulash for our dinner. At the crest of the week's plural pleasures on Sunday singularity slides in and undoes her corsets.
Life has come at me, knocked me open in every way she can think of, but I have remained upright, and I have tried to love you. I put my mouth to the trumpet and blow the fierce note of our agreement. That I will open my heart, open my eyes, open myself to all the guises in which you think it will be suitable to love me.
That I think anything at all these days is in itself a miracle. The bruises stay beneath my skin like a map. I am covered in your fingerprints and the blood pulsing in my veins is touched with madness. Your reputation is as bloody as a bowl of raw liver. I spit a fighter's mouthful of red as elegantly as any moonshiner. You have laced my corsets too tightly.
The world is flat you whisper to me as you dangle me over its edge. Your voice scours my comprehension. You tell me the mullet is a secret agent. Didn't you know? you say. He has decoded all your dreams and sold them back to me. Don't despair. The best of the worst is still to come. It only takes forgiveness for you to open your heart, open your eyes, open yourself to me again, on this sweet drowsy dirty morning in which we still astonishingly find ourselves together.

The copyright of this post belongs to Claire Steele