Burn this house, Burn it blue
Sad one, Sad one Sad One,
Guitar, seeking fire, like a hunger motor
sings of the broken body,
steel rivers humming:
The night sky burns with fire
and the burning bed floats higher.
I came apart – I came all undone
Sailing queerly through the air
until the sailing undid me and I broke.
Laughter crackles and nips
at me like scissors,
leaving me red and rising.
Pain swallows bloom and falls like nails
to land on my cheeks and eyelids.
Examine my life closely,
for it is a painting on the wall:
twins clutch my naked heart,
one cuts its ventricle with scissors;
umbilical cords, uni-browed, dark-edged,
connect me to the shell of earth’s sorrow.
Burn this house, burn it blue.
Oh Sad One, Sad one, Sad One.
Now I’ve taken my bill for the spree.
Oh Black Dove, Where will you walk?
I cannot, I cannot, but I will be free.
I am bathing my heart
which has been torn out of me,
I am bathing it in the river.
I’m tired of breaking
and the dawn doesn’t suffer.
Though I love you, your whirling wheel drills
through rules. Four-inch screws brace my crippled life,
a rod of fire through my body and bones.
Burn the body, this Judas of a body!
Oh wings of Midnight blue, spread my bones.
Let the humming fire sing its dirge:
and night sky burns with fire
and the burning bed floats higher
Sad one, Sad one Sad One,
Burn this house, Burn it blue
“Block Kahlo Rivera 1932” by Carl Van Vechten – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3c03971.
