Crucifixion of Time

There are chills inside
my heart, where I am vulnerable
to the hooks of remembering.
I don’t want the cutting weight
of words preserved to come back
and take me under again,
to fill my lungs with longing. 

I am indifferent towards the absent
truths of my fantasies,
now, it is the ghosts people leave behind
that leaves me cold;
it is the incomplete sentence, the lines unread,
and the face I did not have time to recognize.

From the winter growing inside of me,
I do not become catatonic.
I am frantic—
running through the forest of time
gathering logs, damp with rot
from black daydreams and idle want.  

I find myself hunting dead things
but sparing my favourite corpses,
colouring their pale cheeks with self-sacrifice.
In them, I keep my hubris alive.
I, the martyr of my own schism,
waging wars against myself
like the little soldier who loads bullets into his fingers
and points his gun to the mirror.