Lullaby on a Knife Edge

      
These empty nights,
and tedious days…
it seems he only ever
now promised
to change. And it used to be
she loved his star,
no matter what it’s shape.

It turned out
she had peeled him,
like an orange over the years,
and only then
because he’d let her take,
every last ounce of sparkling grace, and make it
pass
for life.
And her beak fell sharper now
than the edge
of the knife he slept on
when I found him.

He told me then,
I was a sacred fountain;
that I made roses of nails,
that I put wind in tattered
sails and insisted he speed
towards dreams.
But I was just me.
And I told
the truth
in his eyes, that he should
see no more
than soothing stories,
as I wound my fingers
at his temples and he gloried in my golden sighs.

“Tell me just one more
lullaby,” he pleaded, and I caressed his neck,
as I talked of never
going back,
of being here always,
together
and free;
and whispered things that barely seemed
a hair, or a breath,
out of reach or sight…

…but I sent him home, night after night,
with an aching heart and a yearning soul
in fledgling flight…

- because I had to -

and somehow,
I hoped it cushioned the slicing,
and the sharpness
of the edge
of the knife.