The Jade

Older than me it stood
within the House of yesterday,
a monument to the fade from lands unknown--
Itself a piece of the Idea-of-Jade,
drinking earth,
sucking air...
and sole blind witness
to crimes of youth.

I held its hand,
asked it nothing;
could never have dreamt
its asexual secrets--
and that I, too, was a potential
world of jigsawed Pieces
growing roots and shifting shapes...
then it fell off
and I was alone
fighting creations.

I was my own,
an icy island adrift--
the landlocked kingdom
waiting to spread to port,
waiting to root again.

I stole the Jade's Magnesium green
and switched it with Iron to make my Blood--
I had to try,
but the bright flare burnt a
hole in my shoe,
and while I stopped to stamp it out,
my memory uncoiled
and slunk into the earth below.

Fixed and broken I made maps of known realms;
a cartographer charting the stones beneath--
the imperial expatriate family,
obliterating
internally
the leaves that would grow on their own
in buildings built by ghosts…

but if I stay too long--too close,
and use my only root towards truth,
there'll be no escape from Walls or Floors,
and
stuck
inside
these
Halls
of
You.