The Last Mask

Cruel, I say, from the red latch of the throat.
Cruel, because You come with clean hands
and tear from my face the beautiful lie
that made survival possible.

I mean the bright false cloth.
The painted crust.
The little weather I could breathe beneath.
I mean the soft invention that let me
call hunger discipline,
loneliness vocation,
fear a form of wisdom.
I mean the blessed fraud that kept the marrow numb
and therefore useful.

You take it.
You strip the silk from the wound
and name the wound a mouth.

Now everything enters.
Light especially.
Not gentle. No.
It presses like a thumb into the shut eye.
It whitens the joints.
It climbs the ribs one rung at a time.
My breath, cornered animal,
beats itself against the bars of the chest.

I tell You You are cruel.
I tell You Give it back.
Give back the counterfeit dawn,
the veil that made eating possible,
the lie stitched with enough gold
to pass for mercy.
Give me the old anesthesia.
Give me the tender treason
that let me sleep beside my death
and call it bed.

But You keep coming
through the seams of the words I sharpen against You.
Every accusation opens another slit.
Every No becomes a window
the instant I throw it.

So I do what is left:
I pull accusation over my face.
I make of blame a final veil.
You did this. You ruined me. You tore away
what kept me living.
I say it like wet cloth against fire.

And now it burns.
At the eyes first.
Then at the mouth.
Then everywhere the mask was knotted to bone.
The syllables blister on the tongue.
Consonants blacken.
The throat I used for verdict opens
like a struck bell.

What is left of me cannot defend itself.
It can only be entered,
only be brightened past use,
only stand here while Your white nearness
moves through the emptied rooms,
calling each hidden thing
into the pain of its true name.

And underneath the beautiful lie,
underneath accusation,
underneath the last mask to burn,

not death.

First air.