DREAM CATCHERS by Rida

What’s that? you’re up from a nightmare, I see, who did you see?
What was in there, panting, exhausted
You’re skipping beats, losing breath
Is that how i make you feel?
When you drag your ice cold fingers from my parted lips, right until the curve of my navel
I was 6 when this boy touched my back and told me that your spine looks like flowers but feels like wood, but burning
I do not know what he meant then
but now i carry so many photographs
and books and sob stories and
benches of fuckery and drawers of open secrets 
I reckon my back is creaking open like the bark of a tree on fire
Make a pyre out of me, will you?
Instead of cadavers and flesh with no lilac paint on the wrists
Throw in all you had to give me but didn’t 
The pyre of my skin burning slow
there
Throw the cards you didn’t write, the poems you forgot to complete, the lyric that didn’t rhyme, the painting with blotched ink, the hands with no bones, the heart that didn’t ache for me
Throw it all in and watch my pyre burn
Wood and knuckles and dreams and homes built of metaphors, and oceans filled in with verses that flow and rise and fall
Watch my pyre burn only to rise not like your cliché fucking phoenix, but like the dragon with wings, coated in the paints of blue and the songs of the Mockingjay, wrapped in so much warmth and glowing skin, legs spread out with dream catchers rapidly catching fire – burning self love.

Bio:- Quiet storms under my fingertips, I write poems that bleed, aching to write of growing up but there isnt much nostalgia a seventeen year old can spare. Spoken word poetry, incomplete novels, dark humoured scripts, connoisseur of shower thoughts, ikigai is a word you should google.