Fluorescent lights, pale and sticky
Illuminate by their ignorant light
A small bare room
In it
A girl of lackluster frame
Sweat on her brow
Sits with her back turned to the door
The smell of tin and stone and paper,
Familiar in her desolate corner,
Invites for the seeking of truth
Her hair flows in a delicate stream
Rippling down her back
Her eyes carry a black so deep
That She Herself has drowned
The skin of Her hands may seem clean and unused
But beneath them the blood of the heart quivers
Working to maintain a warmth that has since birth been lost
Herr doctor,
Does She terrify?
Peel back the skin
To find Her very insides rotting
Desperate She cries for the sin of night to die
Allah above hears
But to Her God is cruel
With Her eyes a fine slit
Her heart frozen in limbo
The singing voice entices
From outside where the sun is lustful
She can almost imagine
That the walls of her room
Were not stone
And then a match
Brilliance blazes
In the dark of the night
Power reborn
Like a dying star
Coal seethes
Hot and sticky
Dry clay and bitter smoke
Her skin oozing from every orifice
Melting to the ground
The forging of iron
Out of the ash
He emerges
Cat eyed and grinning
His skin bronzed as earth
Indignation deep in his bones
He stretches his hand to the sun,
And welcomes warmth
What’s done has been done
Let the young know
A phoenix has come
