LSD beneath the tongue’s alarm

Women of many faces,
the ones who fall in love with night,
who love it harder than their men,
don’t trust the phone that lights.

Most of those calls mean nothing at all,
most of them drunk, most half-asleep,
women of many faces,
with a hundred wet eyes watching deep,
who know how much the world can bleed.

They’re carved from one same rib of bone,
one root runs through their veins,
each day they live suspended
between resurrection and pain.
Along the roads of their long blue veins,
there’s a scar that answers every name.

Each of them sees both filth and grace
inside her naked skin,
men still pray to them on Sundays
like churches let them in.
They dream about her quiet touch,
for men one faith is always enough.

But men are always short on love,
they build it only out of sound,
that’s why women of many faces
never touch where throats are bound.

Women of many faces,
with hair that falls along their arms,
who wear the likeness of God himself,
know they strike harder
than LSD beneath the tongue’s alarm.

— end —

Septentriones is a multi-instrumentalist, poet, and refugee from Ukraine who transforms the deepest recesses of a soul marked by desolation into words and harmonies that confront loss with intensity and carry the enduring vitality of what has been reclaimed.