god only knows

I might write something nice to you so that because of me the sun comes out and shines on you and makes you warm. I might write the things that make you love me. I would only have unwritten words to describe the sun I just made for you because I have only a silent way to reveal myself, a silence that turns to wrath when I can’t become what you need. I would lay down my head and cry at your feet for forgiveness if only I could stop myself from existing, everywhere, I hear only the hum of me and my dissatisfaction with the guise I’ve succumbed to. I might do something big for you, like crawl back out of the hole I’ve dug, gasping for breath, eyes blackened by soot, to be burned by the sight of you, just so I could be with you shining in your killer flames. But this oracle light who sees in the dark, may be too much of me, for me to bare living. Death looks everywhere for a love yet unmet… so I stood at the crossroads looking for you and you expected someone else…or maybe I expected someone else. The oracle whispered her name in my sleep at this juncture, then someone else came instead, and I laid there in pain, at the meeting of strangely familiar eyes, waiting for her words or her touch to notice me again, but instead you looked the other way as if he was all you had. I could forgive you possibly for choosing a better version of god. I could make you see him in a dimmer light so that I was all you had to fall back on. You won’t catch me will you? This airspun woman who has the voices that know, who slithers upon me like an ancient vice, has me clawing myself into pieces, disengaged from the whole of the leviathan she has become smothering me by doing nothing at all. I myself, have the means to awaken, I myself see the captive in her water mirror, I myself can’t stop picking at my sores, chewing at the rabies in my mind, attacking the animal I eat and who I have become. The animal with red eyes who hates dogs and girls, the animal who hides until the sun goes down and who grimaces at the sound of you. I might be the one you want however, have you ever tried to find my carnal pleasure in your lofty pains unmet?…maybe I know how to stop your search right here and now, without the ripping away of something left over as a fantasty called love…maybe I’m the one with the lasting grip that can hold on and not be lost…and then I see your face and remember all the whispers of that tiny moon whose so afraid, and I want to sing but I only stutter…you do know I come with both pieces dangling, you do hear me when I think of you. Why won’t you look at me? The summer has become the winter but I don’t remember dying, and I’m in a tube and all you do is make things worse. I was expecting you to make me happy. Goddess of death, I think of only you. In a vision I saw myself wrapped in your body, sublime and perfectly known. A vision of me, in charge of you, I dominate the night with anger…then it faded and I felt you slip right through me, back into your world where my face is ugly and there are no fragrant flowers, only burning flesh that never becomes ash, only imaginary friends with thoughts just like mine, only a box with no lid. I can see the sky, but I just can’t find a way to touch it. The tiny moon barely sees and the stars don’t like me and they never did… I bet you think I’m talking to you, but I never meant for you to read my mind. And I don’t like my red eyes, I want eyes like yours.

If I could have brought you the sunshine I would have…

god only knows,
Sharada Devi