"THE KNIFE"
By Adriana Teodoru
I remember the first day I saw the knife
Small little thing, tucked away, hiding the sharpness…
Its glisten drew my eyes, like in some “Sweeny” dream
And beckoned me to take it in my own idle hand.
The handle felt warm, fleshy, as though some body
Had already held it pressed against their skin.
I smiled, coyly, and touched it to my own skin,
The blade’s cold, quiet danger, made the knife
Feel to me like your caress. My body
Became listless, my senses lost their sharp
Bite, and when you touched my hand
You, me, the knife, all three fell into dreaming.
And as we slept, we all three dreamed:
I of your sinew, muscle, flesh and skin,
You dreamed of holding someone else’s hand,
Between us, with hollow dreams, slept silently: the Knife.
Should it have tossed in its sleep, its sharpness
Would have cut us both in our slumber. Three bodies
Intertwined, each one a slave to our own body’s
Needs. Yet truth does not come from dreams
And we must both awaken, with a sharp
Snap of the head and a flush of the skin,
Back to reality where between us is only a knife,
And two severed hearts, unable to handle
Even the slightest touch of a human hand.
Both trapped inside our own body
Of lies, and the only solution… the knife.
I believed, for a moment, the dream
That I was worthy to crawl inside your skin
But you are well protected, your edges sharp,
Unforgiving. Yet I tried to file down the sharp-
Rough parts of you, and somehow hold your hand.
I let you take me, and felt you inside my skin.
No longer a foreign prisoner of my own body,
I’ll weave real from the fabric of the dream
With sheer will power and if needs be, the knife.
Within my lonely life just for a moment, somebody
Took my hand and pulled me into a dream.
It all started and ended with a knife.