Pale Knight (lacerated mind reworked)

Naked and reeling, the obsidian ivy coils around me.
Blackened tendrils of loneliness constricting, choking.
Slow and calculated, the thorns seep into my skin,
as keen to taste my punctured flesh as keen of point.

Like a drop of blood in a pool of milk, tainting.
The bed sheets stain scarlet drip by vermilion drip.
Anima displaced, venom seeps into frost-rimed veins,
wracked once more by restless thoughts and distrust.

Do I lay here dead or dreaming? Thrashing as a child.
Though I hope the latter, is the waking world any better?
My emotions raped, my soul forever broken in two.
I can’t go back. It should be me. Your touch, your voice, your kiss.

Are they mine no more? Is my name an empty sound to you?
Have you replaced the portrait in your bedchamber?
Is my face and my coat of arms just a faded antiquity?
I’m a haunt in your shadow now, a footnote in your diary.

Bitterness encroaches on my sanity, talons in my brain.
Desperately I reach for you to ward off the cold anxiety,
but I can no more touch you skin, nor weep for my despair.
Outside I’m invisible in death’s cage. Inside I quiver with fear.

The vines harden like steel cables, sloughing off my skin.
Their poison in my body weeps inky ichor from my tear ducts.
They whisper to me in a sibilant hiss, “Let go, give it up.
You were born alone. Why not let it end that way too?”

They wrap around my neck, I can’t tell if I’m still breathing,
because I don’t know if I’m alive or dead, awake or dreaming.